On Friday, a new variant of Covid-19 was identified in southern Africa, and by Saturday, the World Health Organization declared it a "variant of concern". It carries a high number of mutations on its spike protein, which may make it less effective in treatments and vaccinations.
Two Omicron cases were confirmed in Australia by Sunday, and the government immediately shut the border to travellers from nine African nations. How worried should Australia be about Omicron?
The speed of Omicron is being studied.
The Kirby Institute has atainment lab at the University of New South Wales where the virus is grown in many of its mutations. His team will start growing Omicron this week. He hopes the virus will bloom by the weekend, and that they can test the effectiveness of the antibodies taken from different kinds of patients.
It would take about a month in the lab to understand how well the antibodies bind to it. We can get that information in a week.
Turville's team will test how the virus behaves against people who are recovered from a vaccine and people who are sick. They will work with other research institutions to test the response of the virus to certain therapies.
Prof Sharon Lewin is a world- renowned infectious diseases expert and the director of the Doherty Institute, which provides modelling to the federal government. She predicts that the Omicron mutations will have the greatest interference with the treatments being used to treat Covid patients.
She said that they are sensitive to spikes in the number of genes. There is a bit of tolerance for variation in the virus. The vaccines we designed worked well against Delta.
She said that the vaccines may be able to protect against hospitalisation and death because of other parts of the immune system. T-cells target all parts of the virus. Lewin said that vaccinated people may have T-cells that can do a good job at protecting against variant.
Australia is hoping to learn more about Omicron.
It takes time to see how a virus behaves in the real world. Omicron has been identified in about a dozen countries, but the numbers are too low to see if it is replacing Delta or if it is due to the mutations.
The World Health Organization says Omicron infections are increasing steeply in South Africa.
Australia is not swamped with Omicron patients or Covid-19 cases, so it can be done in the laboratory for every person who tests positive.
Turville said that the lab is a good early-warning signal and can be the first line of evidence after seeing something that is not quite right in the real world.
Understanding the disease severity in people who are both vaccine and unvaccinated is very important. We learn a lot from watching it spread. The data can take two to three months to tell us something.
How worried should we be about Omicron in Australia?
The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation was asked by the federal government to look into whether third booster shots should be brought forward sooner than six months.
He said that given Australia has a high vaccine coverage, this will offer strong protection. Pfizer can modify the vaccine within six weeks and ship initial batches within 100 days.
Hunt said that they are in the best scientific hands in the world.
The arrival of Omicron has raised concerns about vaccine equity, with most of Africa having poor vaccine rates. Australia has been called on to increase vaccine supply.
We have to not get ahead of ourselves.
Lewin thinks that the WHO classification system may need to be changed given that Omicron was labelled a "variant of concern" by the WHO without enough evidence that it is more transmissible or evading vaccines.
If it got into vulnerable populations, other factors may have led to it spreading rapidly. It could be due to chance.
She said that the WHO chose to press that button very early after seeing a new strain replace Delta in South Africa.
It creates chaos when you push that button. If there is a real variant of concern, we should only be ramping up our response dramatically, including closing borders. We don't know a lot. We don't really have an agreed plan when we identify a variant of concern, so we need to think about what this means.
Lewin was concerned that border closings punished countries with good surveillance systems. She said Delta would eventually find their way into Australia even with international border closings. She said there could be other forms of the virus that had not been detected.
She said that you can't keep a variant out, and that many parts of Africa and other countries don't have a good surveillance system.
