Australia identifies new harder-to-detect Omicron-like variant

Health authorities on Wednesday (December 8) said they have found a new lineage of the Omicron variant of coronavirus has been found in Australia’s Queensland state.

The lineage, which has about half the gene variations of the original omicron, was found in a traveller who arrived from South Africa and tested positive for coronavirus on Saturday.

The state’s acting chief health officer Peter Aitken told reporters that the  new lineage cannot be detected with typical screening.

Aitken said the new lineage has enough markers to be classified as omicron, “but we don’t know enough about it as to what that means then as far as clinical severity, vaccine effectiveness.”

“We now have omicron and omicron-like,” he said.

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The news comes even as Queensland state is planning to reopen its border to other parts of the country next Monday, as the state has vaccinated more than 80% of the eligible population.

Scientists across the world are still trying to fully understand the omicron variant — how virulent the strain is and whether vaccines can reduce severe disease and deaths.

As per reports, the new lineage has 14 of the genome mutations of omicron variant and doesn’t have the s-gene dropout feature, which makes it more difficult to identify through PCR test.