What Is The Omicron Variant?

"It’s not a panic, but it’s a concern." Three experts break down what we know about the new Omicron variant so far.

Transcript

00:00It's almost like 30 mutations in one particular viral protein, which is a very unusual situation.

00:06I suddenly thought of Delta as peak variant and probably it couldn't get much worse than that.

00:11This looks potentially worse.

00:21Omicron is what the WHO has designated to be, has accumulated more than 30 mutations,

00:2826 of which are unique in the spike protein. It has not been observed in any other strains,

00:33Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta or something like that. So that's what actually is puzzling

00:37from the science perspective, that how did it accumulate so many mutations at once.

00:45The general age profile in South Africa appears to be, I mean from the

00:49press reports and all and not from the published literature,

00:53is more children who have it and not the elderly people.

00:57It could be more transmissible or, you know, it might have different kind of

01:06functional activity, which we don't know at this stage. It's not a panic, but it's a concern.

01:20Yesterday, I mapped out the mutations on the structure of spike to see how damaging I thought

01:25it was. And I certainly scared myself. So let's see. I suddenly thought of Delta as

01:34peak variant and probably it couldn't get much worse than that. This looks potentially worse.

01:44There's no reporting from South Africa yet that cases are more severe.

01:47And it looks like vaccines may still be doing something because we heard from there yesterday

01:52that the people in hospital tended to be the unvaccinated people rather than the vaccinated.