Researchers unravel omicron’s secrets to better understand COVID-19

When South African scientists announced in November that they had identified a new variant of the virus that causes COVID-19, they also reported two worrying details: one, that this new variant’s genome was strikingly different from that of any previous variant, containing dozens of mutations compared with the original virus that emerged in 2019; and two, that the new variant — dubbed omicron — was spreading like wildfire.