Omicron - New COVID-19 variant causes concern in Australia

New travel restrictions are being implemented in Australia as a precaution to the Omicron COVID-19 strain that originated in Africa. 

At present nine countries have been identified to have patients with this strain, these countries are South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Botswana, Eswatini, The Seychelles, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Photo: The Independent

Five measures are being taken to contain and prevent the variant from entering Australia. 

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt announced on Saturday the actions that will be taken to accomplish this. 

The first thing will be to deny entry to Australia to anyone who is not a citizen and that has been to any of the nine countries where the variant has been detected within the last 14 days. 

Photo: 7News.com.au

Second, Australian citizens and their dependents that have arrived or are arriving from these locations will need to immediately enter a supervised 14-day quarantine. 

Third, these restrictions will also be applied for international students and skilled visa holders that are arriving from travel bubbles and have been in these locations in the past 14 days.

Fourth, anyone who has arrived in Australia and has been in any of these locations within the past 14 days must immediately isolate themselves and receive a COVID-19 test. 

Finally, all flights coming from these countries will be suspended for the next 14 days as a preventive measure.

A current immigrant from one of these countries in the Northern Territory quarantine camp has been diagnosed with COVID-19, but whether it is the Omicron strain is yet to be established. 

Although Australia’s vaccination rates are over 86%, it is yet to be proven whether the vaccines will be effective against this new strain. 

According to Dr Anfelique Coetzee, the first South African doctor to alert the authorities about the Omicron variant, the symptoms from the new variant are unusual but mild. 

Photo: Newscientist.com

She disclosed that at the start of the month she received patients with symptoms that did not match those of COVID-19, as her patients did not report loss of taste or smell, but rather intense fatigue and in one case, a very high pulse rate. 

An while she reports that all her patients are healthy, it is still too early to know how this variant will affect older individuals as the population of over 65 in South Africa is very few. 

The strain is being studied​​ by leading Australian epidemiologist but it has been declared too early two know the extent of the threat of this new strain as they are still trying to figure it if it’s more transmissible and deadly than the Delta variant. 

But seeing how quickly it has spread throughout South Africa it can be predicted that this strain might be highly contagious. 

Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton supports the measures implemented to buy Australia some time to identify the magnitude of the threat but he claims “It’s going to be impossible to keep out.”

To which NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet agreed, claiming it would be inevitable and that “we need to learn to live alongside the virus and to live alongside the various strains of the virus that will come our way, and the best thing we can do is get vaccinated and get booster shots.”