Fresh information seems to confirm doctors worst fears that the new coronavirus variant first discovered in Botswana and declared to be of “concern” by the World Health Organisation (WHO) spreads faster than the Delta variant.
The new variant named Omicron is believed to be driving South Africa’s fourth wave of infections.The variant was first sequenced in neighbouring Botswana, and then in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria.
In Botswana it was first detected among foreigners who were in Botswana on a diplomatic visit while in South Africa is was detected when a group of students, exactly how many is not known, took PCR tests which all contained an anomaly that prompted experts to send their samples to Prof de Oliviera’s Durban laboratory for genome sequencing.
“His team then found all these mutations. So we’ve only know about it for a few days, and because it’s a new variant we have no idea how it will actually behave,” said Prof Salim Karim, former chair of the South African government’s Covid advisory committee.
“All we can do is extrapolate some of the likely behaviour based on previous similar mutations. But we do know that it spreads fast – we’ve seen how rapidly it spread in Pretoria. It sky-rocketed.”
From a relatively low base, the numbers of confirmed cases in South Africa have shot up this week – from less than 700 last week Sunday to almost 2,500 on Thursday. It is believed the increase is largely down to the new variant.
The World Health Organisation on Friday said the number of cases of this variant, initially named B.1.1.529, appeared to be increasing in almost all of South Africa’s provinces.
“This variant has a large number of mutations, some of which are concerning,” the UN public health body said in a statement.
It said “the first known confirmed B.1.1.529 infection was from a specimen collected on 9 November”.
The WHO said it would take a few weeks to understand the impact of the new variant, as scientists worked to determine how transmissible it was.
A top UK health official warned that vaccines would “almost certainly” be less effective against the new variant.
But Professor James Naismith, a structural biologist from the University of Oxford, added: “It is bad news but it’s not doomsday.”
He said mutations in the variant suggested it may spread more quickly – but transmissibility “is not just as simple as ‘this amino acid does this'” and was determined by how mutations worked together.
Meanwhile, US infectious disease chief Dr Anthony Fauci said that while the reports on the new variant threw up a “red flag”, it was possible that vaccines might still work to prevent serious illness.
“Until it’s properly tested… we don’t know whether or not it evades the antibodies that protect you against the virus”, Dr Fauci told CNN.
Botswana and most of Southern Africa however appear to be suppressing this wave – at least for now- even as South Africa and eSwatini are struggling with an uptick of the virus.
The Reuters Covid-19 Tracker revealed yesterday (Saturday) that infections are “ decreasing in Botswana, with 66 new infections reported on average each day. That is 2% of the peak – the highest daily average reported on August 17.
