Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stressed the need to be “proactive” against the new Omicron Covid-19 variant as two South Africans tested positive in Bangalore for the highly mutated lineage. Modi, who on the weekend chaired a meeting with top government health officials to review Covid-19 precautions, asked officials to review plans to ease international travel restrictions in mid-December, citing “emerging new evidence” of Omicron’s spread across the globe.

Modi also emphasised vigilance in monitoring of international arrivals, with a specific focus on countries identified as “at-risk” for the variant first detected in southern Africa. His statement came as Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal appealed to Modi to halt flights from those countries reporting cases of Omicron.

“With great difficulty, our country has recovered from Corona. We should do everything possible to prevent this new variant from entering India,” Kejriwal said.

In the view “of the threat” from the new variant, people need to be more cautious and take precautions like “masking up and maintaining social distance,” Modi said. He added there needed to be increased urged health authorities to step up the administration of second vaccine doses.

Two South Africans tested positive in Bangalore for Omicron as alarm bells went off around the world over the spread of the new lineage. Karnataka stepped its Covid-19 vigilance ordering heightened surveillance at airports and told all medical college students across the state to undergo coronavirus tests after 281 students tested positive for what was believed to be the Delta variant at an institution in Dharwad in the northern part of the state.

In Bangalore, government officials said 584 people had entered the country from 11 countries in southern Africa. Passengers from these countries will have to stay in quarantine for 10 days even if they have tested negative at the airport, a Karnataka state minister said.

In good news, South African medical officials said worry over the variant might be overdone as symptoms of those patients detected with the illness seemed to be mild even if it seems to be far more contagious. However, more serious symptoms can surface with Covid-19 later during the course of infection.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) urged people not to panic about the new variant but told them to get vaccinated as soon as possible. “We have to wait and watch in order to figure out how the emergence of this new mutant evolves and plays out at the population level," said Samiran Panda, who heads the ICMR’s communicable diseases department.

Suspected cases of the new Omicron variant, which was first detected in the southern African nation of Botswana, have been reported in many different countries from ermany and the UK to Hong Kong and Australia. There have so far been just a small number of cases identified globally so little is known definitively about the strain. The variant was first reported to The World Health Organization (WHO) by South Africa on November 24.

“So far, we have detected that those infected do not suffer the loss of taste or smell, South African Medical Association chairwoman Angelique Coetzee said. “They might have a slight cough. There are no prominent symptoms. Of those infected, some are currently being treated at home,” she said. South African officials said most of the patients hospitalised with Omicron were unvaccinated.

But Omicron does appear to be even more contagious than the highly infectious Delta variant which devastated India and other parts of the world. South African Health Minister Joe Phaahla said: “Although it’s still very early days, it shows that it may be spreading much quicker and catching younger people.” He added though that Omicron appears to result “in mild disease without prominent symptoms.”

The Washington Post’s virus tracker said that cases in South Africa, where just 35 per cent of the population is fully vaccinated, had jumped 592 per cent week over week. The WHO also says there appears to be an “increased risk of reinfection” with Omicron compared to other variants. South Africa has an extremely robust testing system and cases have zoomed from 200 a day last week to 1,200 on November 24 and 2,645 on November 26. It is not known yet how many of the cases were of the Omicron variant.

In Amsterdam, 61 out of 600 passengers on planes from South Africa tested positive for Covid-19 and now are being tested to see whether they have the Omicron variant. Two cases have tested positive in the United Kingdom, one in Germany and another in the Czech Republic. In the US one person suspected of suffering from the newest version of Covid-19 is undergoing testing.

After being blamed for not acting quickly enough in other Covid-19 waves, politicians globally have been keen to get ahead of the virus, even if it turns out they overreacted. In Europe and the US, fears surround the quick transmissibility of the new variant and also because it has 50 mutations, out of which 32 are in the spike region. The spike region is where the virus attaches itself to the human cells.

Travel restrictions are “going to buy us some time,” top US government health official Dr Antony Fauci said. “It’s not going to be possible to keep this infection out of the country. The question is: Can you slow it down?” he said. “Even though the numbers are still small, the doubling time is pretty rapid and the slope of the increase is really
rather sharp,” he told The New York Times.

In South Africa, Professor Tulio de Oliveira, director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform appealed to the world not to isolate his country. “We Identified, made data public, and raised the alarm as the infections are just increasing. We did this to protect our country and the world in spite of potentially
suffering massive discrimination."

The European Union, the UK, Israel, Singapore, the US, Canada and many other countries have temporarily banned the entry of foreign travellers who have recently been in South Africa or any of the neighbouring countries.

In the UK, the government has ordered that mask-wearing will be compulsory in public transport and all shops and supermarkets. Prime Minister Boris Johnson ignored resistance from right-wing members of his Conservative party who insist that wearing masks is an infringement of their freedom of choice. The UK added four new
countries – Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Angola – to what is called its Red List and the UK and Irish citizens arriving from these places will be forced to undergo a 10-day quarantine.

Scientists fear that the new variant may be better at escaping vaccines and that Omicron presents a higher risk of reinfection. So far, scientists say early indications are that the vaccines are still effective in preventing severe disease.

The IMCR’s Panda said, “vaccines which have been directed towards spike protein of the virus may find difficulty in mounting adequate immunity against the mutated version because of the structural changes in the viral genome.”

In the event it is necessary to tweak the vaccines to make them more effective against Omicron, vaccine-makers Pfizer and BioNTech said in a statement they “expect to be able to develop and produce a tailor-made vaccine... in approximately 100 days, subject to regulatory approval.”