The race began last Friday between a virus and information. Even though there wasn't much, the information moved quickly.
The World Health Organization gave the new variant of the virus Omicron because of the abundant amount of mutations in its spike protein.
"We should check this out" was not the "everybody lose their minds" alarm. They seem to sound the same. The world was headed back to March of 2020 when scientists identified Omicron in 18 countries, triggering travel bans, border closings, stock market crashes and holiday weekend worries. Dutch authorities said on Tuesday that the earliest case they can identify is 11 days old, predating Omicron's identification in South Africa.
The Omicron variant is widespread and mysterious because nobody knows what it is. Public health authorities can't say if it is more transmissible than Delta, which has been the most common variant of the disease. Either panic or don't. It's on you. Scientists have to work on the problem.
Scientists don't know how efficiently Omicron moves from person to person. Is it possible to evade immunity by vaccines? Does it cause more serious illness? "We need more than one type of data," says a coronavirologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization-International Vaccine Centre in Canada. Collecting statistics on breakthrough infections and hospitalizations is one of the things that needs to be done.
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That's going to be difficult because a crucial piece of information is missing. The new Dutch data shows that it has been longer than health planners thought. Whether this is the beginning of a wave or the middle or end of a wave is important. "It appears to have been caught at the beginning of an upswing, at a time where everybody has been focused on Delta," says John Connor, a microbiologist at Boston University and investigator at its National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories. The rest of the world can start looking at all the questions that are raised by a new variant of our diagnostics if they have that information early on. Does it look like the immune response generated by vaccines can still fight this virus?
Everyone with Omicron might still be one tight-knit group if this is the beginning. If that group was more vulnerable than the general population, the variant might be more dangerous. The opposite might be true. To figure that out, disease dynamics researchers might do "forensic accounting" to see how previous waves behaved, and compare that to what's happening with Omicron. That could mean something about how bad an Omicron wave could be. Matthew Ferrari, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State University, asked if he would have been wrong if he had assessed Delta using only the time period that corresponds to now.
Scientists didn't know much about Delta based on early data. They know it inside. They need to be patient to understand Omicron. More details of the variant's genetic structure generated by scientists in South Africa might help with early ideas about the variant's behavior. "One can infer from the genetics as to how this virus may escape neutralization, whether it will escape vaccines or not, and so on," says Deenan Pillay, a virologist at University College London. He says that one can never know, but one can make a calculated assessment based on what we know about the genetics of other variant.
