Early action against Omicron is imperative to avoid devastating consequences | Ewan Bernie

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It was only a matter of time before a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged, requiring an urgent global response. The Omicron variant, identified by scientists across Africa, including the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NICD), appears to be the next major threat in the context of the pandemic. Early evidence from their genetic monitoring suggests that this new variant is a serious cause for concern and it is imperative that we act quickly in response to this new information.

The variant has also been detected in Botswana and Hong Kong, and will undoubtedly continue to appear in other regions in the coming days; Travel-related cases have emerged in Belgium and Israel. Two cases of the new variant have been detected in the UK at the time of writing.

When Omicron was first discovered, viral genome experts had already noticed the large number of changes relative to the original Wuhan strain. Alarmingly, a large number of these mutations are related to the spike protein, which the virus uses to infect our cells, and some of these changes have been known to be responsible for faster transmission or immune escape in other strains. However, it is possible that other changes in this strain made the virus less efficient at transmitting.

The Omicron variant appears to be on the rise. South African researchers could be more confident in this because of an anomaly in the virus also seen in the alpha variant; There is a change that affects the reading of some routine PCR tests (“S gene target failure”). This means that South African researchers can reprocess their routine tests to create an effective proxy for the emergence of this variant. The strong inferred growth by proxy (albeit from a low baseline), and the sequence information we have, means that there is a high probability that this virus is either more transmissible or evading the immune system, or both.

There is no data yet to suggest that the Omicron variant increases disease severity or resistance to our current vaccines. This will require future laboratory investigations and ongoing monitoring in several countries over the coming weeks. And we must consider this potential discovery of immune escape, which has been present in nearly every epidemic plan, in the context of our progress: identify the novel genetic variant at high speed; Thanks to the sharing of open data, the global scientific community has been alerted to it and is getting to work – once again – to understand what the risks are.

Finally, our experience and understanding of the Alpha and Delta variants demonstrate that early action is much better than late response. This alternative may turn out to be less of a threat, but the consequences of not acting early can be devastating.

However, the real heroes of this story are the Botswana and South African scientists who collected data quickly, provided insightful analyzes, and were open and transparent about their findings.

Euan Bernie is Deputy Director General of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and Director of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute.

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