Omicron cases double in South Africa in just 24 hours as officials say strain is ‘dominant’

Masked taxi passengers in South Africa
AP
Josh Salisbury2 December 2021

The Omicron variant of coronavirus has become dominant strain in South Africa with cases essentially doubling in just 24 hours, officials have said.

Around 8,500 new infections were registered in the latest figures - almost double the 4,300 registered the day before.

The country’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) has said more than 70 percent of all the virus genomes it sequenced last month were of the new variant, the BBC reports.

South Africa was the first country to report the new strain, although it has since been found to have been present in other countries as far back as October.

It has now spread to at least 24 countries, including the UK. There are now 22 confirmed cases of the variant in Britain.

Scientists around the world are racing to understand how infectious the new variant of concern is, and how effective vaccines will be against it.

The new cases in South Africa confirm the country is experiencing a fourth wave, but as with previous iterations of Covid, there is a delay before the effect of rising case numbers are fully seen in data on hospital admissions or deaths.

The world scrambled to impose travel bans on countries including South Africa in the wake of Omicron’s discovery last week.

While a full picture is yet to emerge on whether the new variant can partially evade the body’s immune defences, there were early positive signs on Wednesday from Israel that current vaccines may only be slightly less effective against it.

But ministers in the UK struck a cautious tone in their assessments on Thursday.

Business minister George Freeman told LBC he could not give a commitment on whether scientists were close to an answer on Omicron.

He said “urgent work” was still live to fully understand the new variant, formerly called B.1.1.529.

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