PAHO urges Caribbean countries to produce vaccination against COVID-19. Photo: ©Dmytro/123rf

Is it Omicron a new menace? The answer is no. In real terms is an old one.  One more since the pandemic began.

As nations severed air links from southern Africa amid fears of another global surge of the coronavirus, scientists scrambled to gather data on the new Omicron variant, its capabilities and — perhaps most important — how effectively the current vaccines will protect against it.

The early findings are a mixed picture. The variant may be more transmissible and better able to evade the body’s immune responses, both to vaccination and to natural infection, than prior versions of the virus, experts said in interviews.

The vaccines may well continue to ward off severe illness and death, although booster doses may be needed to protect most people. Still, the makers of the two most effective vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, are preparing to reformulate their shots if necessary.

Even as scientists began vigorous scrutiny of the new variant, countries around the world curtailed travel to and from nations in southern Africa, where Omicron was first identified.

Despite the restrictions, the virus has been found in a half-dozen European countries, including the United Kingdom, as well as Australia, Israel and Hong Kong.

Omicron accounts for most of the 2,300 new daily cases in the province of Gauteng, South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced.  Nationally, new infections have more than tripled in the past week, and test positivity has increased to 9 percent from 2 percent.

Worldwide scientists have reacted more quickly to Omicron than to any other variant.

The Teenagers Getting Six Figures to Leave Their High Schools for Basketball

‘Looking for the Good War’ Says Our Nostalgia for World War II Has Done Real Harm

Who Owns a Recipe? A Plagiarism Claim Has Cookbook Authors Asking.

They won’t know the results for two weeks, at the earliest. But the mutations that Omicron carries suggest that the vaccines most likely will be less effective, to some unknown degree, than they were against any previous variant.

TTC – International press