A new “omicron-like” coronavirus strain has been found in a traveler who arrived from South Africa and tested positive for the coronavirus on Saturday, health authorities in Australia’s Queensland state said Wednesday.
After seeing more than 2,000 COVID- related deaths, Australia delayed re-opening its borders last month over concerns with the new strain.
According to the state’s acting chief health officer Peter Aitken, the new omicron lineage has about half the gene variations of the original highly mutated COVID-19 variant identified late last month, and can’t be detected with typical screening.
Aitken pointed that the new lineage has enough markers to classify it as omicron, but they have yet to establish what that means in terms of clinical severity and the effectiveness of the vaccine against it, so officially, they now have ‘omicron’ and ‘omicron-like’.
Australian scientists are not sure what the discovery means since viruses mutate often and can share similar genetic codes. On top of that, even omicron is still being studied and is yet to be deemed more virulent or dangerous than other variants, as, for example, the now-dominant delta strain.
What they know so far is that omicron has managed to spread across at least five continents in about a week, increasing concerns about its virulence and that it shares genetic material with the coronavirus associated with the common cold and could be more transmissible as a result.
As the virus mutates, most genetic changes it goes through are more or less harmless but some can increase the new variant’s capability to infect cells or evade antibodies.
A new small study led by virologist Alex Sigal, a professor at the Africa Health Research Institute, in South Africa, suggests a 41-fold decline in levels of neutralizing antibodies against the Omicron variant stated in the study among individuals given the Pfizer vaccine.
The study also showed that a combo of a previous infection followed by vaccination or vaccine with an additional booster would likely offer stronger protection from severe symptoms in omicron infection.
That leads to the conclusion that an increased level of antibodies in a person equals an increased chance he’ll be protected from omicron.
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