Adherence to existing safety measures best defence against new COVID variant – Anthony

Amidst concerns about the new COVID-19 variant, Minister of Health Dr Frank Anthony on Friday urged persons to observe the existing safety measures to prevent spread of the virus.

Dr Anthony made the call during his daily COVID-19 update, where he stated that while not much is known about the new Omicron variant, it is important for persons to adhere to safety measures. While the variant has not been detected here, he noted that everyone should be concerned about any variant that has been reported.

“Well, we should be concerned about any variant that is circulating but Omicron from what has been described and what has been discovered so far, we know for example that this virus, this particular variant has more than 50 mutations, 32 of which are on the spike protein and that’s the protein that they generally use to develop vaccines,” he said.

The health minister added that while research is currently ongoing, it is unclear if these additional mutations would lead to what scientists call immune evasion, which means that the new virus can evade current immunity.

“Now we are not sure so because this thing has only recently been discovered, so no country can say for certainty that there is immune evasion, it is just a theory and that is now being tested in the laboratory to see whether this is so or not.”

Meanwhile, the minister during the update stated that the country currently has 1,177 active cases of which approximately 519 of those are in Region Four while some 248 are from Region Six and 207 in Region Three. This, he said, shows that there has been a significant decrease in active cases in Region Three even as Region Four is back to being the region with the most active cases.

The minister urged persons to take the COVID-19 preventative measures seriously. “Because of these concerns, people ought to take precautions and make sure that couple of things that they wear their masks especially when they are in public spaces and especially when they are in indoor spaces...” He then urged persons who have not yet been inoculated to get vaccinated.