These early signs made omicron different from previous Covid variants, experts say.
until countries around the world have more equal and ready access to vaccines, experts say. “It’s definitely sobering,” Kamil said. “It’s an exaggeration to say we’re back at square one, but this is not a good development.
” Within hours of the WHO’s designating omicron a “variant of concern” Friday, dozens of countries imposed new travel bans, places that had loosened restrictions reintroduced mask mandates, and anxieties ran high.It was the kind of quick and intense development reminiscent of early stages of the pandemic, prompting some concern that governments were overreacting before enough about the omicron variant was known. “It’s partly why people started facetiously calling these things ‘scariants,’” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease doctor and a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. But even before it was given the “omicron” designation, the variant quickly gained attention among Covid researchers. South Africa was the first to report clusters of cases involving the omicron variant last week. Days before, data about the newly identified variant had also been uploaded to, an online database for disease variants, by a research team in Hong Kong, followed by more early sequences from scientists in Botswana. The number of mutations observed with the omicron variant hasn’t previously been seen with other strains, Adalja said. There are concerns that specific mutations to the spike protein could make the omicron variant less vulnerable to the so-called neutralizing antibodies generated by vaccines or natural immunity from previous Covid-19 infections. "There's a very good chance this variant will be very resistant to neutralizing antibodies, but we can't yet say with any degree of certainty how resistant," said Theodora Hatziioannou, a virologist at Rockefeller University in New York City.In lab experiments with a virus that was genetically altered so it didn’t pose a threat to humans, Hatziioannou and her colleagues produced myriad combinations of spike protein mutations and tested how well they were able to evade Covid-19 antibodies. One of their more worrisome outcomes was observed in a lab-produced spike protein that carried 20 mutations — more than had been observed in any other known variant at the time but fewer than in the omicron variant. It was largely resistant to neutralizing antibodies from both vaccines and natural immunity., but Hatziioannou said many of the variant's mutations correspond to the types of changes she and her colleagues studied in the lab.Scientists around the world are racing to characterize the omicron variant, focusing in particular on whether it is more contagious, causes more severe disease or can evade the protection of vaccines. Those open questions may awaken anxieties from early in the pandemic, but Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, said drug therapies and the vaccines still offer crucial advantages. "We have a whole bunch of tools now that we didn't have before," he said."But it's disappointing, for sure. There was kind of this general feeling that we're coming off this delta wave, we're triple-boosted, and it could almost be like 2019 again." Adalja said the emergence of the omicron variant should spur people to get vaccinated or to get booster shots. Countries should also increase testing for Covid-19 to track where — and how quickly — the variant is spreading. Since omicron was designated a"variant of concern," more than 40 countries have banned travel from southern Africa. Hatziioannou said such sweeping measures, which may have been a"knee jerk reaction" to the most recent devastating wave of delta infections, are largely ineffective. "The variant is likely already here," she said."Closing the barn door after the horses have bolted is useless."
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