Starting last Friday, There’s a race going on — between the virus and the information about it. And for a while, information moves faster, even though there’s barely any information.
Scientists in South Africa have identified a new variant of the virus that causes Covid-19 — within days the World Health Organization has given it the spy-science-fiction name Omicron — and due to multiple mutations in its mutant protein, the nano tentacles attach and crack into the cells, the scientific alarm begins to sound.
But clearly, they are “We should check this” warnings, not “Everybody is insane” warnings. Obviously they sound the same. Panic flew when scientists identified Omicron in 18 countries, activated travel ban, Close the border, stock market crash, and, in the United States, the holiday anxiety weekend that the world is back to March 2020. Researchers in South Africa and Botswana have found the most cases to date, though that may is an artifact of finding them; On Tuesday, Dutch authorities announced that the earliest case they could identify was 11 days old, which predates the identification of Omicron in South Africa.
That means the common and mysterious Omicron variant – the smallest variant wrapped in a hologram encased in a Rorschach test – because no one knows for sure. Public health authorities have yet to say whether it is more toxic or more transmissible than Delta, which since last summer has attracted most of the other variants of SARS-CoV-2. Too panicky; or not. It is up to you. Because now scientists have to solve the problem.
The things scientists don’t know, but need to: How efficiently does Omicron move from person to person? Can it ward off immunity from a previous infection, or from a vaccine? Does it cause more serious illness? “We need a variety of data,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Foundation-International Vaccine Center in Saskatchewan, Canada. That means getting genomic and epidemiological data, understanding the immunological differences of variants, and gathering statistics on breakthrough infections and hospitalizations.
Things get complicated, because one key piece of information is missing: how long Omicron has spread around the world. New Dutch data suggests it’s been longer than health planners initially hoped. Whether this is the beginning of a wave – or the middle or the end of a wave that no one notices – is key. “It seems to have been caught at the start of growth, at a time when it’s not,” said John Connor, a microbiologist at Boston University and an investigator at the National Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases. everyone is focused on Delta. “The nice part about having that information early is that the rest of the world can start examining all the questions posed by a new variant: Will our diagnosis still work? It seems that the immune response generated by the vaccine can still neutralize this virus? ”
Assuming this is just the beginning, everyone with Omicron could still be a tight group, demographically or biologically. That could make this variation seem more dangerous — moving faster or making people sicker — if that group is for some reason more vulnerable than the general population. Or the opposite may be true. To figure that out, epidemic dynamics researchers can perform “forensic calculations” to see how earlier waves like Delta behave and compare that to what’s happening. with Omicron. That might say something about whether they underestimated or overestimated how bad the Omicron waves were. “If I was rated Delta only by the period corresponding to the current time period, how wrong was I?” Matthew Ferrari, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State University.
