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Since last Friday, The race is ongoing-between the virus and the information about it. For a while, information moved faster, even if there was hardly any.
Scientists in South Africa have discovered a new variant of the virus that causes Covid-19 — within a few days, the World Health Organization gave it a spy science fiction name Omicron — and because of its spike protein, nanomechanical tentacles A large number of mutant cells attached and ruptured, and scientific alarms began to sound.
But to be clear, they are “we should check” alerts, not “everyone has lost their mind” alerts. However, obviously they sound similar. Scientists have discovered Omicron 18 countries, Trigger Travel ban, Border closure, Stock market crashAnd, in the United States, the holiday weekend is worried that the world will return to March 2020.Researchers in South Africa and Botswana have found the most cases so far, although this may be the product of searching for them; on Tuesday, the Dutch authorities announced that the earliest case they could identify was 11 days, Earlier than Omicron’s recognition in South Africa.
This means that the Omicron variant is extensive and mysterious-a replica wrapped in a hologram, covered in the Rorschach test-because no one knows anything. Public health authorities cannot yet say whether it is more toxic or spread more easily than Delta, which has excluded most other SARS-CoV-2 variants since last summer. So panic; or don’t. It’s on you. Because now scientists must solve this problem.
Scientist thing Don’t know, but need: How efficient is Omicron moving from person to person? Can it escape the immunity conferred by previous infections or vaccines? Will it cause more serious diseases? “We need multiple types of data,” said Angela Rasmussen, a coronavirus scientist at the International Vaccine Center of the Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Organization of Saskatchewan, Canada. This means acquiring genomic and epidemiological data, understanding the immunological differences in variants, and collecting statistics on breakthrough infections and hospitalizations.
All this will become complicated, because a key piece of information is missing: how long has Omicron been circulating around the world. New data from the Netherlands shows that it takes longer than health planners originally hoped. Whether this is the beginning of a wave—or the middle or end of a wave that no one notices—is the key. John Conner, a microbiologist at Boston University and a researcher at the National Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases, said: “It seems to have been discovered at the beginning of the ascent, when everyone was focusing on Delta.” “Get this information as soon as possible. The benefit is that the rest of the world can begin to examine all the questions raised by the new variant: Are our diagnostic methods still effective? Does it seem that the immune response generated by the vaccine can still neutralize the virus?”
If this is just the beginning, then from a demographic or biological perspective, everyone with Omicron may still be a tightly integrated group. If the group is more vulnerable than the general population for some reason, then this may make the variant look more dangerous-moving faster or making people sick. Or the opposite may be true. To figure this out, disease dynamics researchers might conduct “forensic accounting” to look at the behavior of previous waves like Delta and compare it to what happened to Omicron. This may indicate whether they underestimated or overestimated the severity of the Omicron wave. “If I only used the time period corresponding to the current time to evaluate Delta, how wrong would I be?” said Matthew Ferrari, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State University.
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