Oz detects new version of Omicron

SYDNEY/LONDON: Australia’s Queensland state has found a new Omicron lineage in a traveller who arrived from South Africa, health authorities said on Wednesday.

The new lineage has about half the gene variations of the original and can’t be detected with typical screening, the state’s acting chief health officer Peter Aitken told reporters. It was found in a traveller who had arrived from South Africa and tested positive for the coronavirus on Saturday, he said.

The new lineage has enough markers “to be able to classify it as Omicron, but we don’t know enough about it as to what that means then as far as clinical severity, vaccine effectiveness”, Aitken said. “We now have Omicron

People queue up for PCR test in Seoul, South Korea.

and Omicron-like.”

The discovery comes as the World Health Organization said on Wednesday that the Omicron variant has been reported in 57 nations and the number of patients needing hospitalisation is likely to rise as it spreads.

“Even if the severity is equal or potentially even lower than for Delta variant, it is expected that hospitalisations will increase if more people become infected and that there will be a time lag between an increase in the incidence of cases and an increase in the incidence of deaths,” the WHO, in its weekly epidemiological report, said.

But WHO and US scientists separately told AFP that Omicron appears to be no worse than other coronavirus strains.

While it is likely more transmissible than previous variants, “the preliminary data don’t indicate that this is more severe,” the World Health Organization’s second-in-command told AFP.

“In fact, if anything, the direction is towards less severity,” WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan said in an interview on Tuesday, insisting though that more research was needed.

Top US scientist Anthony Fauci echoed the WHO’S view.

The new variant is “clearly highly transmissible,” very likely more so than Delta, the current dominant global strain, Fauci told AFP. “It almost certainly is not more severe than Delta,” he said. “There is some suggestion that it might even be less severe.”

READ: 3 doses of Covid-19 vaccine neutralise Omicron variant: Pfizer