Omicron variant of Covid-19 - the latest global threat

The new Omicron Covid variant has arrived, and with it are coming new restrictions. What happens next?

Omicron variant of Covid-19 - the latest global threat

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• The story: The biggest lesson that the Covid-19 pandemic has taught the world, it is that acting early pays off. Wait a week for better data on which to base a decision and you can find yourself down a path of no return, with cases rising steeply. So when news emerged on November 25th in South Africa of a worrying new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, many countries in Europe and elsewhere banned travel from countries in southern Africa within a day. And soon, on November 26th, the World Health Organisation (WHO) named the variant Omicron, a Greek-alphabet designation which, as a rule, it reserves only for “variants of concern”.
• VoI and VoC: The virus keeps on mutating continuously, with most mutations being useless from the harm potential point of view. But when a mutation, or set of mutations, begins displaying some dangerous trend, then the WHO labels it a VOC - Variant Of Concern.
• Omicron: The latest VOC is Omicron, with many concerns!  

1. The biggest is that it may have the ability to spread more easily than Delta, the variant that dominates cases of covid around the world today.
2. If so, Omicron could supplant (replace) Delta within months. That is how this evolution works.
3. In that case, Omicron would cause bigger outbreaks that flare up faster than Delta and are harder to stop.
4. Another worry is that today’s vaccines and drugs against covid may be less potent against Omicron and may therefore need to be redesigned. (but they may be effective, as well)

• How to be certain: It will take weeks or even months before there is solid evidence from laboratory and other studies on how much of a threat Omicron really poses. In the meantime many countries are trying to stop the new variant from arriving on their shores inside travellers—and rightly so. They are buying time to prepare for the worst while hoping for the best.

1. The first signs that a new variant may be spreading emerged in South Africa earlier in last week of Nov 2021, when covid infections increased suddenly and sharply, from fewer than 300 cases on November 16th to more than 1,200 on November 25th.
2. The vast majority of these infections were in one province, Gauteng, which has Johannesburg as its capital. At first it seemed as if the infections were linked to one big superspreading event, such as a student party. That would be the sort of outbreak in which a new variant erupts briefly and then dies away. But new cases in Gauteng instead became more dispersed over time. That prompted South African scientists to look at the genomic sequence of viral samples, which is how they spotted the new variant.
3. Analysis confirmed that the new variant was spreading fast in many other provinces in South Africa, even though the numbers were still small. This pattern suggests that Omicron may be outcompeting Delta. The nature of Omicron’s mutations adds backing for this hypothesis. It has about 50 of them, an exceptionally large number. Most worrying are ten found in the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the virus’s spike protein. The RBD is the part of the virus that attaches to human cells, enabling the virus to enter and infect them. By comparison, the Beta variant has three changes to the RBD and Delta only two.

• Nature and role of mutations: With mutations, quantity is not necessarily quality (as many may be harmless). But several of those in Omicron have been found in studies of other variants to make the virus more infectious.

1. Some of them make it easier for SARS-CoV-2 to evade the body’s innate immune response (the immune system’s first reaction), others weaken its antibody response (a defence mechanism built as a result of prior infection or vaccination).
2. Various combinations of Omicron’s mutations are present in all of the variants of concern to have emerged so far.
3. If the mutations in Omicron turn out to make covid vaccines less potent, the jabs may have to be tweaked. On November 26th Pfizer and BioNTech, makers of the covid jab that is most widely used in Western countries, said that they would be able to rework their mRNA vaccine within six weeks and ship the first batches within 100 days. The mutations in Omicron do not appear to be a threat to the efficacy of antiviral medicines for covid, but they could defeat some antibody therapies, which are given to people unable to mount an immune response.

• Road ahead: Even if Omicron comes to dominate in South Africa, it is unclear that it will displace Delta in other parts of the world. South Africa had a wave of the Beta variant that did not become established elsewhere. Likewise, Alpha, which swept across Europe, never became established in South Africa. These patterns may have to do with variations in demography and with common infections that interact with SARS-CoV-2 in poorly understood ways.
• Summary: All in all, lots about Omicron remains to be discovered. What is clear, however, is that the world is better placed to resist it than when Delta emerged in India at the end of 2020. By the time Delta had been identified as a variant of concern, it had already spread to many parts of the world, eventually seeding wave after wave of the pandemic. It remains to be seen whether Omicron poses a global threat on such a scale.
• EXAM QUESTIONS: (1) Explain the way evolution works with viruses. (2) What's the essential difference between a variant of interest (VOI) and a variant of concern (VOC). (3) Explain the right way forward for the world, not that Omicron has arrived.

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