Via The New York Times: Omicron Updates and Covid News: Growing List of Nations on Alert Over Variant. For some reason, the nations declaring travel bans on southern Africa are not imposing such bans on one another. Excerpt:
Dutch health officials said on Sunday they had found at least 13 cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant among 61 infected passengers who had arrived in the Netherlands from South Africa on Friday. The new cases were a clear sign that the virus was crossing borders even as governments imposed new travel restrictions and flight bans.
Additional cases could emerge, as health officials were still examining test samples, said Hugo de Jonge, the country’s health minister, adding that the people who tested positive were in quarantine. The 61 passengers who had tested positive were among more than 500 who arrived on two separate flights.
A growing list of countries are scrambling to respond to the new, highly mutated version of the virus, which was first detected in Botswana and South Africa and which has sent ripples of panic through governments and markets. Health officials in Australia and Denmark on Sunday both confirmed cases of the Omicron variant in travelers recently arriving from southern Africa.
The World Health Organization warned on Friday that Omicron was a “variant of concern,” the most serious category the agency uses for such tracking, and said that its numerous genetic mutations could help it spread more quickly, even among vaccinated people.
Scientists cautioned that relatively little is known about the new variant, and that only a small number of confirmed cases have surfaced globally. Still, there are worries that Omicron could have spread more widely before scientists in South Africa discovered it last week, and the memories of the rampaging spread this year of the Delta variant have prompted new waves of travel restrictions, aimed primarily at southern African countries.
Britain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Israel are among the countries that have identified Omicron infections in recent days and imposed new travel restrictions. In a sign of how seriously the authorities in Europe, which is already battling a surge of coronavirus cases, are taking the new threat, officials in France on Friday also suspended arrivals from seven southern African countries even though the new variant had not yet been detected in France.
“It’s probably a question of hours, let’s be honest,” Olivier Véran, the health minister, told reporters on Sunday at a vaccination center in Paris. But he added that “new variant doesn’t necessarily mean new wave, or that the variant is more dangerous.”
“To be safe, we are acting as though this variant is potentially dangerous,” he said.
