Southern Africa is not a hotbed of variants — it’s just very good at sequencing and spotting them
Original article from Business Insider , 2021
Last week, scientists in South Africa put the world on notice. Omicron is here.
The announcement, on Wednesday, that virus-chasers in that country had found a new variant with dozens of fresh mutations, sent alarm bells through the halls of the World Health Organization.
The variant, B.1.1.529, was identified first on November 11, among foreign diplomats who had traveled to Botswana. Then, it was found again by a team of scientists in South Africa on November 14, and they alerted world health leaders. By November 26, the WHO designated the newly-christened Omicron a variant of concern.
While researchers worldwide jumped to start studying Omicron — asking whether it spreads more easily than Delta; causes more deaths; or requires new vaccines — the US, UK, and EU responded to the discovery with swift travel bans, blocking flights from South Africa, Botswana, and six neighboring African countries that had not detected the new variant.
It’s thanks to southern Africa that the rest of the world is on alert at all, racing to answer those important public health questions.
The reality is that southern Africa is a top international powerhouse of COVID-19 surveillance in large part because the continent stood up innovative systems for tracking viral diseases and genetic mutations well before the coronavirus hit, tracing and surveilling diseases including HIV, Ebola, and tuberculosis.
“We had a really strong research background with our universities, as well as the different research consortiums,” Vicky Baillie, a senior scientist at Wits Vaccines & Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit in South Africa, said.