Omicron On Marin’s Radar: Health Officer

MARIN COUNTY, CA – If the newly discovered, highly contagious omicron variant arrives in Marin, public health officials should know fairly soon.

Marin’s top health official said Friday that the county sends samples from about a quarter of those who test positive for COVID-19 to a lab for genomic testing.

“I’m confident that if we do see the emergence of the omicron variant, that we will be able to actually detect that, early on,” Marin Health Officer Dr. Matt Willis said in an interview with NBC Bay Area.

Omicron is blamed for an exponential case surge in South Africa, where it was first discovered, from around 200 a day two weeks ago to 2,465 on Thursday, USA Today reports.

The World Health Organization on Friday classified omicron as a "variant of concern."

News of omicron's emergence tanked markets Friday, with the Dow Jones experiencing its biggest single-day loss in more than a year, and triggered new travel restrictions.

Omicron contains a "very unusual constellation of mutations" that appear to make it more contagious than the highly transimisble delta variant, The New York Times reports.

Early indications are that it poses a higher risk of reinfection than other variants, but the WHO warned against overreaction until more is known about the variant, The Associated Press reports.

“What’s known so far absolutely warrants attention—not panic,” The Atlantic’s Katherine J. Wu writes in “We Know Almost Nothing About the Omicron Variant,” noting that omicron faces a formidable challenge as it looks to gain an advantage over delta, which remains dominant.

“Not all variants of concern turn out to be, well, all that concerning; many end up being mere blips in the pandemic timeline," Wu writes.

Willis is more concerned with the existing threat than one which experts don't yet know much about.

"The most important threat to us right now in the Bay Area, remains the delta variant," Willis told NBC Bay Area.

"We know how to control that. Vaccines are by far the most important things we can do, and then everyday behaviors that we've adopted in the last year and a half."

Dr. John Swartzberg, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, is among the first Bay Area health experts to publicly express concern about omicron.

Swartzberg said it's unclear whether omicron's "physical structures" will diminish the effectiveness of vaccines in the NBC Bay Area report.

"It's important for people to realize that these new variants may have physical structures that suggest it might not respond to the immunity we got from the vaccines," he told the television station.

"We can deal with this, but I wish we didn't have to."

Dr. Angelique Coetzee, an infectious disease expert who chairs the South African Medical Association, said it’s “premature” to draw sweeping conclusions about omicron, The Guardian reports.

“It’s all speculation at this stage. It may be it’s highly transmissible, but so far the cases we are seeing are extremely mild,” she said.

“Maybe two weeks from now I will have a different opinion, but this is what we are seeing. So are we seriously worried? No. We are concerned and we watch what’s happening. But for now we’re saying, ‘OK: there’s a whole hype out there. [We’re] not sure why.’”