The Omicron Variant Is a Mystery. Here’s How Science Will Solve It
Original article from WIRED , 2021
So far, panic about the new Covid variant has outpaced actual information. Here’s what scientists around the world are trying to uncover.
Starting last Friday, the race was on—between a virus and information about it. And for a while, the information moved faster, even though there was hardly any of it.
Scientists in South Africa identified a new variant of the virus that causes Covid-19—within days the World Health Organization gave it the spy-sci-fi name Omicron—and because of the abundant smorgasbord of mutations in its spike protein, the nanomechanical tentacle that attaches and cracks into cells, science alarms started going off.
But to be clear, they were the “we should check this out” alarms, not the “everybody lose their effing minds” alarms. Apparently they sound alike, though. Panic took flight as scientists identified Omicron in 18 countries, triggering travel bans, border closures, stock market crashes and, in the United States, holiday weekend worries that the world was headed back to March of 2020. Researchers in South Africa and Botswana have found the most cases thus far, though that may be an artifact of looking for them; on Tuesday, Dutch authorities announced that the earliest case they can identify is 11 days old, predating Omicron’s identification in South Africa.
That means the Omicron variant is widespread and mysterious—a palimpsest wrapped in a hologram draped in a Rorschach test—because nobody knows nothin’ yet. Public health authorities can’t yet whether it is more virulent or more transmissible than Delta, which since last summer has crowded out most other variants of SARS-CoV-2. So panic; or don’t. That’s on you. Because now scientists have to work the problem.
The things scientists don’t know, but need to: How efficiently does Omicron move from person to person? Can it evade the immunity conferred by prior infection, or by vaccines? Does it cause more serious illness? “We need multiple types of data,” says Angela Rasmussen, a coronavirologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization-International Vaccine Centre in Saskatchewan, Canada. That means getting genomic and epidemiological data, understanding the variant’s immunological differences, and collecting stats on breakthrough infections and hospitalizations