Countries were racing to contain the Omicron coronavirus variant by restricting travel and imposing new quarantine measures as new cases were detected around the world on Sunday.
A third case was identified in the UK and dozens more were being treated as suspected cases, people familiar with the matter told the Financial Times. The government mandated mask-wearing for shops and public transport in England, and people entering the UK will be required to take a PCR test within two days of their arrival and self-isolate until they receive a negative result.
The US, EU, UK, Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia and South Korea all limited travel or ordered quarantines on individuals travelling to and from southern Africa while others, such as Singapore and India, signalled they were reviewing restrictions. Switzerland has also restricted travel to non-African nations where cases have been detected.
Israel became the first country to close its borders to foreigners after one case was confirmed and several more were suspected. Returning travellers will be forced to quarantine, monitored by the army and domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet.
“Everyone is tired of life in the shadow of the coronavirus,” said Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett. “I hear what people are saying to me: ‘We have just emerged from the Delta strain and now a new strain has arrived?’ It is not easy but it is reality.”
Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, called on the countries imposing controls to immediately end “completely unjustified” travel bans imposed on southern Africa over the Omicron variant, which was first detected in Botswana and South Africa.
“There is no scientific justification whatsoever for keeping these restrictions in place”, and South Africa was “deeply disappointed” by the actions of the UK and others, Ramaphosa said in a televised statement on Sunday.
The restrictions “unfairly discriminate” against southern Africa when the emergence of Omicron should be a wake-up call to end inequality over African access to vaccinations compared to rich countries, he said.
Despite the rise in cases and a flagging mass vaccination campaign, South Africa would not impose additional restrictions over Omicron and was still reviewing whether to bring in public vaccination mandates, the president said, attributing the identification of the variant to “the excellent work of our scientists”.
The country’s business leaders say travel bans will throttle Africa’s most industrialised economy.
Anthony Fauci, the US chief medical adviser, said the variant’s mutations were “troublesome”.
“[Omicron] has the capability of transmitting rapidly,” he told NBC. “That’s the thing that’s causing us now to be concerned but also to put the pressure on ourselves now to do something about our preparation for this.”
Fauci cautioned that in the longer term the US “certainly [was] not going to eradicate” Covid-19, but that it was within “our own grasp” to coexist with the virus if the “overwhelming majority of the population [is] vaccinated and boosted”. No cases had yet been detected, but he said the new variant could already be present in the US.
In the Netherlands, health minister Hugo de Jonge said that 13 Omicron cases were found among 61 passengers who tested positive for the virus on two flights from South Africa to Amsterdam on Friday. All positive passengers have been quarantined in hotels for seven days; de Jonge said it was “conceivable” that more Omicron cases were present in the country.
Calls for renewed lockdowns were growing louder in Germany after the national academy of sciences, Leopoldina, published a paper advising the government to introduce restrictions on public and private gatherings, including for the vaccinated. Two cases of the Omicron variant have been confirmed in the southern state of Bavaria, while a third was confirmed in the state of Hesse, which contains Germany’s largest airport in Frankfurt.
In an interview with Bild am Sonntag, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called on citizens to prevent a German lockdown by voluntarily restricting their contact with others.
The World Health Organization designated Omicron a “variant of concern” on Friday, saying it appeared to be able to reinfect patients and that it displayed mutations previously associated with diminished vaccine efficacy and higher transmissibility.
Both findings have yet to be confirmed, and it is also not yet known whether the variant alters the severity of Covid.
The WHO has called for borders to remain open and for “balance” in the global response to the variant, saying countries should strategically deploy their testing and sequencing capabilities. The Omicron variant can be detected by proxy on routine PCR tests, as it misses a gene — S — that Alpha, a previous variant, also lacks. Genomic sequencing is needed to confirm its presence.
Since coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, more than 261m people have been infected globally and at least 5.1m have died, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Additional reporting by Stefania Palma, Samer Al-Atrush, Christian Davies and James Shotter
