What we don’t know about the appearance of the omicron variant

“I can sympathize with the knee-jerk reaction that if you hear something new and potentially upsetting, you want to keep it. The point is that South Africa, at this stage, feels very much a victim of their own good deeds,” said Wolfgang Preiser, head of the department of virology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, told NPR on Wednesday. “The results were announced as soon as we were sure of it. And this is really enabling other countries to pay attention to it.”