Oh My Omicron

Uriel Mont for Pexels

Early last week we started hearing reports of a new COVID variant first identified in southern Africa that was being referred to as Nu. It wasn't hugely widespread yet, but was a concern because it was extremely infectious and had a number of mutations, including on the spike proteins, which are the parts of the virus that many vaccines are designed to target. 

Within a couple days when it was in the news much more, they were referring to it as Omicron. According to this article, a couple Greek letters were skipped in the official naming scheme (I'm not surprised - "nu" sounds a lot like you're just saying it's "new").

While the new variant does have a large number of mutations and seems to be very infectious, they're also saying people are getting milder infections. Still, the US and many other countries have closed travel from 7 African countries where it was identified. Which is basically pointless, because this variant has also already been found in a few European countries and elsewhere, and we're not closing the borders to them... And if it's in all these places already, it's probably everywhere and we just don't know it yet, as we've already seen with the original COVID-19 virus and some of these other variants. Scientists in South Africa are saying they're being punished for having successfully identified this variant early. 

This is a good article about what's known and unknown so far about Omicron. Interestingly, they mention that some of the antiviral treatments currently in development could become very important if the vaccines are less powerful against this variant. And of course, this is all happening just in time for the holidays and lots of traveling and people getting together..