“It Was Scary”: How South African Scientists Spotted Omicron Variant

ON Friday Nov. 19, Raquel Viana, Head of Science at one of South Africa’s biggest private testing labs, sequenced the genes on eight coronavirus samples – and got the shock of her life.

The samples, tested in the Lancet laboratory, all bore a large number of mutations, especially on the spike protein that the virus uses to enter human cells.

“I was quite shocked at what I was seeing. I questioned whether something had gone wrong in the process,” she told Reuters, a thought that quickly gave way to “a sinking feeling that the samples were going to have huge ramifications”.

She quickly picked up the phone to her colleague at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) in Johannesburg, gene sequencer Daniel Amoako.

“I didn’t quite know how to break it to them,” she recalls. She told Amoako, “To me, it looks like a new lineage.”

The discovery of