1) My gut feeling from hearing of Omicron cases in Botswana, ex-Malawi, ex-Egypt (2 now it seems) and in South Africa is, that the variant was flying under the radar in undersequenced countries for some time until Botswana and South Africa detected it and sounded the alarm.
2) However, the fact that European countries only detected it in travelers after South Africa and others warned about it, probably means that many cases so far went undetected. It also tells us a lot about genomic surveillance in some high income countries.
3) The mutations in Omicron which seem to wipe out the majority of neutralizing antibody epitopes are very worrisome. Combined with the apparent fitness of the virus, this could be a problem. There is now a lot to do to get a better idea of the risk this virus variant poses.
4) We need to first figure out how widespread it is, how well it escapes neutralizing antibodies (assumption: very well), what its R0 is, how well it does against Delta and if it can cause severe disease in vaccinated or recovered individuals.
5) Adapted vaccines need to be tested (this has started already) etc. Also, we should not forget that non-neutralizing antibody epitopes and T-cell epitopes are likely largely intact. And even if a variant vaccine becomes necessary, we would not start from scratch....
6).....since it is likely that one 'variant-booster' would do the job. Our B-cells can be retrained to recognize both, the old version and the variant, and it doesn't take much to do that.
7) But there are a lot of unknowns, and many 'scariants' have come and gone. I assume we will have a much better idea about the actual risk in 2-3 weeks. We need to stay calm and do our work.
8) A shoutout and big thank you to @Tuliodna and many other researchers from South Africa and Botswana for sharing sequences and information in real time!
9) There was an update on the second case from Egypt. It seems now it was not from Egypt:
https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1464551930802364421
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