Infectious disease expert explains COVID-19's new variant of concern, omicron

A new variant of concern has emerged in the COVID-19 pandemic and it was recently named omicron by the World Health Organization.

Omicron was first identified in South Africa on Wednesday, but it has also been found in Europe, Australia, China and, as of Sunday, Canada.

The WHO said early evidence suggests there's an increased risk of reinfection with this variant.

To learn more about omicron, Jeff Douglas, host of CBC Radio's Mainstreet, spoke on Friday with Dr. Lisa Barrett, an infectious disease specialist and a clinician at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

This discussion has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you know about this new variant of concern, omicron?

[Omicron] is a variant of COVID-19 and this designation is one of concern. That means it's been elevated from one of interest to one of concern, which puts it into a higher level of alert, mainly because of the potential for maybe transmissibility, maybe infection and [it] may be a threat to vaccines. 

Because of the maybes there, it is a variant of concern and the World Health Organization has said, "We should do some work on this and fast," but it is also being mindful of the fact we don't actually know a lot clinically or from a virus perspective about it yet. 

South Africa has seen a pretty steep spike in cases which does correspond with the appearance of this variant. That doesn't necessarily mean that there's a causal link, so what do we know about the way those patients are looking clinically?

Clinically it does not — at least right now — appear to look like a clinically more virulent or destructive virus. This variant didn't just show up on Wednesday, it was reported on Wednesday and people have been following it for a while. 

Many people have seen this virus and have been doing a little bit of work on it to date and so the upswing in cases — what we do need to be very clear about is whether or not this is a virus problem or just that this virus came about in an area where there were almost no vaccines and almost no public health measures. If those two things were in place in that area, this might not mean the virus is more transmittable. We just don't quite know yet. 

South Africa has a vaccination rate of about 24 per cent, compared to Canada's 75 per cent. Many other African countries have vaccination rates in the single digits. What does that say to you and tell us about mutations like omicron?

In case anyone's forgotten, we've always said that if you have a space for this virus to grow — whether that's because of low vaccination or because you take away public health measures too fast — it will and it will mutate. 

Its sole job is to be better and better at transmission and infection. [It's] not shocking that this is an area where you're going to see the generation of variants.