Israel has identified four cases of the B.1.1.529 variant, all recent travellers. One case, a 32-year-old woman returning from South Africa, was triple vaccinated with Pfizer and had her 3rd dose just two months ago.
Another, a hotel worker from Malawi, had her second dose of AZ in mid-July. A third had her second J&J dose two months ago.
No reports yet if these people are suffering from any symptoms at all; all travelers are screened with PCR tests on arrival, which is how they were identified.
Tiny sample size of course, very early days, etc. We still no next to nothing about this variant.
On the one hand, B.1.1.529 became the dominant variant in SA frighteningly quickly; on the other, it did so from a very low base number of cases, which makes it easier to be dominant in percentage terms.
Clarification here: No reports IF they had symptoms or not. I'm not saying for sure that they are asymptomatic.
As this thread is being shared to support all sorts of different views, here's my spotters' guide to Covid conspiracy theorists arieh.substack.com/p/covid-conspi…
Update: only one of these four is a fully confirmed case of Omicron. The other three (plus three more) are suspected cases, but their viral loads are too low now to confirm fully. Which itself might be a good sign?
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