Since last Friday, the race continued – between a virus and information about it. And for a while, the information moved faster, though there was almost none of it.
Scientists in South Africa have identified a new variant of the virus that causes Covid-19 – within days the World Health Organization gave it the spy-fantastic name Omicron – and because of the abundance of mutations in its thorn protein, the nanomechanical tentacle that attaches and cracks in cells, scientific alarms began to sound.
But to be clear, they were the “We need to check this” alarms, not the “Everyone’s losing their minds” alarms. Apparently, however, they sound the same. Panic erupted when scientists identified Omicron in 18 countries, causing travel bans, border closures, stock market crashes, and in the United States, holiday weekends worried the world was back by March 2020. Researchers from South Africa and Botswana has found the most cases so far, although this may be an artifact of their search; on Tuesday, Dutch authorities announced that the earliest case they could identify was 11 days before Omicron was identified in South Africa.
This means that the Omicron variant is widespread and mysterious – a palimpsest wrapped in a hologram draped in a Rorschach test – because no one still knows anything. Public health authorities are still unable to say whether it is more virulent or more portable than Delta, which has pushed out most other variants of SARS-CoV-2 since last summer. So panic; or not. It depends on you. Because now scientists have to work on the problem.
Things scientists I don’t know, but I have to: How effectively does Omicron move from person to person? Can you avoid the immunity provided by a previous infection or by vaccines? Does it cause a more serious illness? “We need a lot of data,” said Angela Rasmussen, a coronavirus specialist at the Vaccine and Infectious Diseases Organization, International Vaccine Center in Saskatchewan, Canada. This means obtaining genomic and epidemiological data, understanding the immunological differences of the variant and collecting statistics on sudden infections and hospitalizations.
All this will be complicated because important information is missing: how long Omicron has been around the world. These new Dutch data show that it has been longer than healthcare professionals originally hoped. Whether this is the beginning of a wave – or the middle or the end of one that no one has noticed – is key. “It seems to have been caught on the rise, at a time when everyone was focused on the Delta,” said John Connor, a microbiologist at Boston University and a researcher at the National Laboratories of Emerging Infectious Diseases. “A good part of the early deployment of this information is that the rest of the world can begin to address all the issues raised by the new option: is our diagnosis still working?” Does it appear that the immune response generated by vaccines can still neutralize this virus?
If this is just the beginning, let’s say, then everyone with Omicron can still be a cohesive group, demographically or biologically speaking. This could make the option look more dangerous – moving faster or making people sick – if this group was for some reason more vulnerable than the general population. Or the opposite may be true. To understand this, researchers of disease dynamics can do “forensic accounting” to see how previous waves like Delta behaved and compare it to what is happening with Omicron. This may say something about whether they are underestimated or overestimated how bad the Omicron wave can be. “If I had to judge Delta using only the time period that corresponds to approximately now, how much would I be wrong?” Said Matthew Ferrari, director of the Center for the Dynamics of Infectious Diseases at Penn State University.