Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: The highly contagious Omicron variant is likely to replace the Delta strain as the most dominant one in the next few weeks, experts in Singapore warned on Wednesday.
Delta, still the most common strain in all continents, except Africa, may be replaced by Omicron which is spreading very quickly, Dr. Sebastian Maurer-Stroh, Executive Director of Bioinformatics Institute, part of the state-owned Agency for Science, Technology, and Research, said here.
Omicron comprised between 7 and 27 percent of new genome submissions made over the past month to the Munich-based Gisaid, a data science initiative that provides the shared genome platform for Covid.
“From current data, it looks like Delta will go down over time relative to Omicron,” The Straits Times said, quoting Dr Maurer-Stroh, who is part of the global team that runs Gisaid.
Omicron was first detected in South Africa on November 11, and then in Botswana and Hong Kong, before it spread across over 110 countries. On November 24, the World Health Organization (WHO) had categorized it as Variant of Concern (VOC).
Omicron is already dominant in Australia, India, Russia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, Professor Dave Fisher, a senior consultant at the National University Hospital’s Division of Infectious Diseases, said.
“We are watching a global transition from Delta to Omicron because, with a greater transmissibility, the virus is fitter and has a reproductive advantage,” he noted.
A South Africa study suggested that Delta may be displaced because infection with the new variant boosts immunity to the older one, the media reported.
While the Delta variant has 13 mutations with nine on the spike protein, Omicron has about 50 mutations not seen together before, and 32 of them are on the spike protein. Because of its mutations, the Delta variant attaches more effectively to human cell receptors, causing it to be more infective.
But the Omicron variant made health authorities more concerned, as the virus is even “stickier” because of its extra mutations. The rise and fall of new variants over time follows the laws of nature and only the fittest survive, Prof. Fisher noted.
Globally available evidence shows that the Omicron variant is likely to be more transmissible, but less severe than the Delta variant.