The Omicron Variant Of COVID-19

There is growing global alarm over Omicron, the new corona virus variant that first emerged in South Africa. Researchers around the world say that it could be the most infectious form of the virus so far and it might even beat current vaccines.

The Omicron Variant Of COVID-19

Response of the other nations has been swift. Many nations have banned air travel from South Africa. The travel restrictions are also applied to other Southern African nations including Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi and Mozambique. The South African government says the closures are an overreaction. South Africans unexpectedly find themselves cut off from the world.

African Countries With Travel Ban

Since the UK announced its travel ban, many other countries have followed. South Africa's government says that they acted too quickly. The reaction of some of countries in terms of striking travel bans and such actions are completely against the rules and principles as guided by the World Health Organization. 

The world has made progress in the battle against the corona virus but the new variant shows that the fight against virus is far from won. The message for now, get the vaccine get the booster and follow public health regulations.

It is not that easy to identify. We have to understand that at the instant we really only have two things to go on. We have what is happening in South Africa where this virus, for the moment, looks like is replacing delta that suggests that it might spread faster than delta or better than delta. No one knows that yet it is just one spot but that is the one thing the other thing is the genome and the genome of this virus is quite unusual, means, it has a lot of the same mutations that we have seen in Alpha and better in delta. Some of the variants of concern that we have seen but it also has a lot of other mutations. Some of which you know science that was done previously a year ago showed would be very concerning because they might make the virus better at escaping immunity. So at the moment we really have two really big red flags. Let's say but certainly we have to wait the next days and weeks to find out which of these fears are actually going to be true or any of them. We still have a lot more to study.

South Africa, visibly, is the country on that region that tests the virus most widely. It has a very good surveillance network and South African scientists have done remarkable work here and they went public very early with this when they had just 100 genomes as they knew that it was very important in this situation to get the news out fast so that people could prepare for what may come afterward.

Here the question rises that could vaccines be even less effective with Omicron and to what amount? At the current point, it is assumption. If you look at the genome, there clearly are marks that are very vis-à-vis and the experts that looked antibody neutralization from different viruses all suspect that this virus might be a little bit more difficult for vaccine-induced immunity or natural immunity to repel. It does not mean that immunity abruptly goes away but there is a big chance that we will find out that the vaccines are, to some extent, less effective against this variant but we have to wait for the experiments to be done that takes some period. We have to prepare for the possibility and even if it is not true for this variant, we have to be ready for the possibility that other variants may come and it will happen sooner or later.