The World Health Organization (WHO) has named the newly discoveredimmensely mutated and more transmissible strain of COVID-19 ‘Omicrom’, anddubbed it a “variant of concern” on Friday.
WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19 Maria Van Kerkhove said in a video onTwitter that, “Omicron, B.1.1.529, is named as a variant of concern becauseit has some concerning properties. This variant has a large number ofmutations, and some of these mutations have some worrying characteristics”.
Named after the Greek letter, the Omicron strain was first identified inSouth Africa and later in Botswana, Belgium, Hong Kong, and Israel.Meanwhile, the WHO said that the number of Omicron cases “appears to beincreasing” in almost all the provinces of South Africa.
This variant has an extraordinary collection of mutations that may increaseits ability to elude some, but not all, of the defenses of the COVID-19vaccines, and is raising concerns about it being more infectious than theDelta strain. Germany’s BioNTech is studying how well the coronavirusvaccine that it developed with Pfizer safeguards against the new variant.
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The WHO stated that the “current SARS-CoV-2 PCR diagnostics continue todetect this variant”.
The new strain has triggered global concerns afresh, and the WHO has alsohas urged countries to enhance their surveillance and virus sequencingefforts to increase their understanding of the circulating variants.
