It is not a fail-safe because the Alpha variant, first identified in Britain, also has that mutation. To distinguish Omicron from Delta, the PCR test must be able to identify a mutation in Omicron known as the S-gene drop-out or S-gene target failure (SGTF). Most PCR tests cannot distinguish Omicron from the Delta variant, the dominant and most infectious version of the virus so far. 'Already faced with a challenging winter due to the high transmissibility of the Delta variant (.) we may now experience further or additional pressures because of the appearance of the Omicron variant,' she wrote. 'Certain Member States lag behind considerably in terms of this crucial dimension,' Stella Kyriakides said in a letter seen by Reuters to health ministers of the 27 EU countries. The bloc has now confirmed 42 cases in 10 countries. The European Union's health commissioner has urged member states to boost efforts to detect mutations, as some still lag behind almost two years into the pandemic. Scotland and Singapore are scrambling to check tens of thousands of recent positive cases for signs of the variant they may have missed and the United States is enhancing its COVID-19 surveillance to distinguish domestic cases of the Omicron variant from the still-dominant Delta. It took the World Health Organization (WHO) months to designate it a variant of concern - its highest level. The speed of the action is in stark contrast to the emergence of other variants - when the first samples of the Alpha variant were documented in Britain in September 2020, the government spent months gathering data and assessing its potential danger before imposing a nationwide lockdown in December. Work to establish if it is more infectious, deadly or evades vaccines will take weeks.īritain and other major economies banned flights to and from southern Africa just days after the variant was first detected, roiling global financial markets and stirring worries about the economic damage. The pace of the work highlights the pressure on governments and public health authorities to decide quickly whether they need to take unpopular, economically damaging steps to curb Omicron's spread.ĭata shows it was circulating before it was officially identified in southern Africa last week and it has since been detected in more than a dozen countries. LONDON/BRUSSELS/SINGAPORE - Governments around the world are urgently scouring databases for recent cases of COVID-19 infections, screening travellers and decoding the viral genomes of the new variant as they try to measure how far it has spread.

Gem ws1 oriental screen