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November 29, 2021 – The new variant of the coronavirus Omicron, which was discovered in several countries in recent days, will spread widely around the world and will inevitably reach the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Diseases, he said Monday.
“Obviously we are on high alert,” he said Good morning America.
“It is inevitable that sooner or later it will spread widely, because it has at least the molecular characteristics to be highly transmitted,” he said. “Although there are many things we don’t know about, we will be able to find out in the next week or two.”
Despite the unknowns, Fauci said, vaccinated people appear to be doing better against the new option than unvaccinated people. Those who have received booster doses seem to be doing even better.
“I would strongly recommend that you step up now and not wait for the next iteration of [the vaccine]which we may not even need, “he said. “Pharmaceutical companies are preparing to make a specific booster for [the Omicron variant]but we may not need it. ”
As of Monday morning, 12 countries had reported 165 cases of GicAID’s Omicron variant, a global database for genomic sequencing of viruses. South Africa, which was the first to open the option and report it to the WHO, found 114 cases, followed by 19 in Botswana, 12 in the Netherlands and five in Australia. Four or fewer cases have also been reported in the United Kingdom, Belgium, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel and Italy.
On Sunday, Canada became the first country in North America to discover the Omicron variant, with two cases confirmed in Ontario.
On Monday, Portugal confirmed 13 cases of the option among a Lisbon-based football club, including a player who recently traveled to South Africa, according to ABC News.
President Joe Biden will provide an update on the administration’s response to the Omicron option on Monday, according to The Hill. Biden met with Fauci and members of the White House’s COVID-19 response team on Sunday to discuss the new version and the latest information from the WHO, which identified Omicron as a “worry option.”
During the meeting, Fauci told Biden that it would take “approximately 2 more weeks” to learn more about the Omicron variant, reports The Hill, including details on how it spreads, how heavy it can be and how well it can avoids vaccines.
Fauci emphasized that people should be vaccinated against COVID-19, noting that he believed that the injections “were likely to provide a degree of protection against severe cases of COVID”. He also called on vaccinated people to get booster vaccines “as soon as possible” to “provide the strongest protection available from COVID.”
A group of senior health officials in the Biden administration called on South African scientists on Sunday to review the latest information on the Omicron variant and determine the next steps, according to The Washington Post.
The administration will focus on booster shots as a key way to protect people against the new option as scientists learn more, the paper said. Researchers in South Africa say they expect more outbreaks in people who are fully vaccinated, although they are still unsure whether the option causes serious illness.
Current travel restrictions
On Monday, the United States began restricting travel to people from eight countries: Botswana, Esvatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The European Commission, Canada and the United Kingdom have also banned travel from countries in South Africa.
Some countries have introduced stricter travel bans, banning all foreign travelers, according to New York Times. Also Monday, Japan joined Israel and Morocco in closing the borders to all in an attempt to prevent the spread of the Omicron option.
Australia has also announced that it will postpone its plan to reopen the borders to foreign students, skilled migrants and travelers from Japan and South Korea, the newspaper said. Healthcare professionals will use the 2-week delay to investigate whether the Omicron variant is more contagious than the Delta variant.
Singapore and Malaysia continued their plans to reopen their land borders on Monday, while South Korea announced it would postpone the easing of restrictions on social distancing, the newspaper said.
Study of the efficacy of the vaccine
Over the next 2 weeks, vaccine scientists will collect data on the new variant to determine how contagious it is and whether current vaccines will protect against it, according to New York Times.
The Omicron variant already accounts for most of the 2,300 new daily cases in the South African province of Gauteng, the newspaper reported. New infections have more than tripled across the country in the past week, and positive tests have risen from 2% to 9%.
The variant has a “Frankenstein mix” of mutations that could make it more portable and able to avoid immunity to both vaccination and natural infection, the newspaper said. Doctors in South Africa also reported an increase in re-infections in those who already had COVID-19 and recovered. Omicron has about 50 mutations, including more than 30 of the spiny protein that allows the virus to invade human cells.
“Based on a lot of work that people have done on other variants and other mutations, we can be pretty sure that these mutations will cause a significant drop in antibody neutralization,” said Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Cancer Research Center. Hutchinson in Seattle told times.
Some of the mutations have been observed before, but some are unique to Omicron. The National Institute of Infectious Diseases in South Africa tests blood from fully immunized people against a synthetic version of the variant and the results may be available in about 2 weeks.
Another team from the African Institute of Health Research is breeding live Omicron strains to test the variant in blood samples from fully immunized people and those who have been infected before, the newspaper said. These results may take longer, but will provide a better picture of the vaccine’s effectiveness in the real world.
Based on the results, vaccine manufacturers may be able to modify their vaccines to help. Pfizer and Moderna began testing their vaccines against Omicron last week and announced that they could adapt their current vaccines within 6 to 8 weeks and deliver the first batches within 100 days.
Report mild symptoms so far
A South African doctor, who was one of the first to suspect that a different strain of coronavirus was circulating, said on Sunday that symptoms seemed mild so far, according to Reuters.
On November 18, Dr. Angelique Cutzi noticed that seven patients at her clinic had symptoms different from those of the Delta variant: severe fatigue, body aches, and headaches. They tested positive for COVID-19 and it reported the results to the National Institute of Infectious Diseases.
Coetzee, who is also chairman of the South African Medical Association and a member of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Vaccines, said patients had not reported any loss of smell or taste or a serious drop in oxygen levels. Most of her patients with the Omicron variant are under 40 years of age and about half have not been vaccinated.
“Most of them see very, very mild symptoms and none of them have admitted patients so far [the hospital]She told Reuters. “We were able to treat these patients conservatively at home.”
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