The Omicron Variant Is A Mystery. Here’s How Science Will Solve It
Starting from the last Friday, the race was on between a virus and information about it. And for a while, the information moved faster, even though there was hardly any of it.
Scientists in South Africa identified a new variant of the virus that causes Covid-19—within days the World Health Organization gave it the spy-sci-fi name Omicron—and because of the abundant smorgasbord of mutations in its spike protein, the nan mechanical tentacle that attaches and cracks into cells, science alarms started going off.
Apparently, they sound alike, though. Panic took flight as scientists identified Omicron in 18 countries, triggering travel bans, border closures, stock market crashes, and in the United States, holiday weekend worries that the world was headed back to March of 2020. Researchers in South Africa and Botswana have found the most cases thus far, though that may be an artifact of looking for them; on Tuesday, Dutch authorities announced that the earliest case they can identify is 11 days old, predating Omicron’s identification in South Africa.
This means the Omicron variant is widespread and mysterious—a palimpsest wrapped in a hologram draped in a Rorschach test— nobody knows nothing’ yet. Public health authorities can’t yet whether it is more virulent or more transmissible than Delta, which since last summer has crowded out most other variants of SARS-CoV-2. So panic, or don’t. That’s on you. Because now scientists have to work the problem.
The things scientists don’t know but need to: How efficiently does Omicron move from person to person? Can it evade the immunity conferred by prior infection, or by vaccines? Does it cause a more serious illness? That’s all going to be complicated because a crucial piece of information is missing: How long Omicron has been spreading around the world. That new Dutch data suggests it has been longer than health planners first hoped. Whether this is the beginning of a wave—or the middle or end of one that no one noticed—is key. “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 nice part about having that information early is that the rest of the world can start examining all the questions that are raised by a new variant: Do our diagnostics still work? Does it look like the immune response generated by vaccines can still neutralize this virus?”
If this is just the beginning, let’s say, then everyone with Omicron might still be one tight-knit group, demographically or biologically speaking. That might make the variant seem more dangerous—faster-moving or making people sicker—if that group was for some reason more vulnerable than the general population. Or the opposite might be true. To figure that out, disease dynamics researchers might do “forensic accounting” to see how prior waves like Delta behaved and compare that to what’s happening with Omicron. That might say something about whether they’re under- or overestimated how bad an Omicron wave could be. “If I were to have assessed Delta using only the time period that corresponds to about now, how wrong would I have been?” says Matthew Ferrari, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State University.
South Africa COVID-19 Cases Surge As Omicron Variant Spreads
South Africa has accelerated its vaccination campaign by giving jobs at pop-up sites in shopping centers and transportation hubs to combat a rapid rise in new COVID-19 cases a week after the discovery of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.
New daily cases nearly doubled to 8,561 Wednesday, from 4,373 a day earlier, according to official statistics. Scientists said they were bracing for the surge to continue.
“We want families to be safe this festive season,” Minister of Health Joe Phaahla said Thursday. “Before you go home before you leave on vacation, make sure you protect yourself and those you love. If you visit your parents and they have not yet been vaccinated, go with them to your closest vaccination site. It could save their lives.”
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In October, before Omicron was discovered, the Delta variant was the dominant form of the coronavirus in South Africa.
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Scientists in South Africa and around the world are doing genetic sequencing of Omicron samples to learn more about the variant. Much remains unknown about Omicron, including whether it is more contagious, as some health authorities suspect, if it makes people more seriously ill or whether existing vaccines are effective against it.
Gauteng Premier David Makhura said Thursday he was encouraged to see more people getting vaccinated, with the province recording at least 50,000 vaccinations daily this week.
However, about half of the province’s 16 million people remain unvaccinated, Makhura said. The number includes many migrants who are in South Africa without authorization and therefore are unable to get vaccinated because they cannot be recorded in the digital vaccination system, he said.
About 36 percent of adults in South Africa are fully vaccinated, according to official statistics. The country now has 19 million doses of the Pfizer-Biotech and the Johnson and Johnson vaccines, but the pace of vaccinations has slowed.
That’s why officials launched the new campaign to increase the numbers of vaccines administered before large numbers of South Africans begin traveling and socializing during the holiday season.
Since the pandemic began, South Africa, with a population of 60 million
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