"South Africa has done an extraordinary job identifying, sequencing and transparently sharing data on the variant," he said Friday on Twitter. But he said while a travel ban could help slow the spread by a week or two, it doesn't outweigh the cost. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, said it's "entirely possible" that the omicron variant is already here in the U.S. Simone Wildes, an infectious disease specialist at South Shore Hospital, joined us to discuss Omicron - the new variant of concern first detected in South Africa.ĭr. Pfizer and its partner BioNTech said they expect to be able to tweak their vaccine in around 100 days.ĭr. The variant’s swift spread among young people in South Africa has alarmed health professionals even though there was no immediate indication whether the variant causes more severe disease.Ī number of pharmaceutical firms, including AstraZeneca, Moderna, Novavax and Pfizer, said they have plans in place to adapt their vaccines in light of the emergence of omicron. With so much uncertainty about the omicron variant and scientists unlikely to flesh out their findings for a few weeks, countries around the world have been taking a safety-first approach, in the knowledge that previous outbreaks of the pandemic have been partly fueled by lax border policies. Germany also said it suspected a positive case and Dutch authorities were testing whether 61 people who arrived on two flights from South Africa with COVID-19 have the omicron variant. In addition to the U.K, cases have been reported in travelers in Belgium, Israel and Hong Kong. Pharmaceutical companies expressed optimism that they could finesse their vaccines to deal with the new variant though that would clearly take some time.ĭespite the banning of flights, there are mounting concerns that the variant has already been widely seeded around the world. Many countries have slapped restrictions on various southern African countries over the past couple of days including Australia, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, Iran, Japan, Thailand and the United States, in response to warnings over the transmissability of the new variant - against the advice of the World Health Organization. The WHO announcement marks the first time in months that it has classified a COVID-19 variant as the highly-transmissible “variant of concern.” The classification also applies to delta, which has become the world’s most prevalent variant. The WHO suggested that the variant could pose greater risks than the delta variant, which was first detected in India and has been causing ravages worldwide. health agency also said early evidence on the variant, until now known by the technical term B.1.1.529, has shown an increased risk of reinfection compared to other highly transmissible variants, indicating that people who contracted COVID-19 and recovered could be more subject to catching it again with Omicron. Here's what we know so far: What is omicron? The new variant, explainedĪn advisory panel of the World Health Organization on Friday classified a worrying new COVID-19 variant first detected in South Africa as a highly transmissible virus of concern, naming it “omicron” under its Greek letter system.
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