As the port city of Durban eases into South Africa’s annual summer holiday season, scientists at a virology laboratory at the Africa Health Research Institute are working around the clock.
The discovery of the omicron Covid-19 variant by South African and Botswanan scientists last month has lent urgency to efforts to isolate the virus and test its ability to evade vaccines the world is pinning its hopes on to end a two-year pandemic.
The goal is to figure out “what happened? How does it happen? What can we do to decrease it,” said Alex Sigal, 51, who runs the lab that was the first to isolate the beta variant, the Covid-19 strain that’s been most successful in getting past inoculations. We “then figure out a way to quickly adjust our responses,” he said.
South African labs have been critical to combating the coronavirus. They’ve identified two of the five so-called variants of concern and trained scientists from across the continent on how to gene sequence to spot and track variants.
Sigal’s lab was the first to test omicron against blood plasma from people who’d received two doses of the shot produced by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE. It also updated a paper that hypothesizes that variants may develop in immuno-suppressed people who’re unable to easily shake off the virus, allowing it to mutate.
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