On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that preliminary evidence appears to indicate that vaccines may be less effective against infection and transmission linked to the Omicron variant of Sars-CoV-2, which also carries a “higher risk of re-infection”
On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that preliminary evidence appears to indicate that vaccines may be less effective against infection and transmission linked to the Omicron variant of Sars-CoV-2, which also carries a “higher risk of re-infection”. According to data compiled by GISAID, a global science initiative that provides open-access to genomic data of influenza viruses, a total of 60 countries have so far submitted to it sequencing data that shows the presence of this highly mutated variant on their shores.
A man wears a face mask as he walks past an image of Santa Claus at a Christmas market, in London(AP)
To be sure, the Delta variant still easily remains the world’s most dominant variant, accounting for 97.9% of the nearly 3.17 million genome sequences uploaded in the four weeks ending December 13 to GISAID.South Africa, however, is far from being the only that has seen a record spike at the same time that Omicron infections have seen a spike.In London, the prevalence for Omicron cases (those with S-gene dropout) has been steadily rising. In the past week, 38.4% of all infections in the British capital have been Omicron cases.