What the Data on Coronavirus Omicron Actually Shows
A lot of speculation about the new variant is not super helpful
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Thirty thousand nucleotide bases.
Just 30,000 letters of the alphabet of life are enough to create the entire SARS-CoV-2 virus, provided those letters find the machinery present in all of our cells to do the hard work. Those letters get copied, and copied, and copied with each new infection, in each new cell, and errors compound. The vast majority of those errors make SARS-CoV-2 a less effective virus. But some have the opposite effect, honing the virus to accomplish the only thing that RNA really wants to do — make more copies of itself. This is evolution. And this is how variants are born.
A new variant takes center stage this week — notable primarily for the dramatic international response to its emergence. Countries around the world are slamming their borders shut. What makes omicron so special?
There have been a flurry of stories and rather breathless news reporting on the new variant, and I appreciate that the situation is evolving rapidly, but for now, I wanted to take an opportunity to try to put all the hard facts in one place.
First — a bit of timeline. The earliest omicron sample, that we know of so far, was collected on November 9 in Botswana. It was sequenced by South African researchers and uploaded to a central site on November 23. On November 24, South Africa made its report to the WHO. We’re still in the early days.
But not that early. As of the time I’m recording this, omicron cases have been identified in more than a dozen countries including Germany, the U.K., China, Australia, and Canada. By the time you watch this, it will certainly have been identified in more. The U.S. instituted a travel ban on South Africa and seven other countries Monday. But I’d honestly be very surprised if it isn’t here already.
