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Experts urge tighter airport screening to check Omicron
View(s):With a Sri Lankan woman who arrived from Nigeria on November 24 being detected with Omicron this week and neighbouring India also reporting this ‘variant of concern’, experts are urging the health authorities to bring in tighter screening of all arrivals at the airport.
Many experts stressed that it would be advisable to conduct RT-PCR tests on all those coming into the country, whether unvaccinated or vaccinated, to get a heads-up to ensure that COVD-19 positive people do not roam around undetected in the country with a high chance of spreading the infection.
The Sri Lanka Medical Association (SLMA) has said that as several European countries, Australia and the United States have also detected cases, it requests the government to conduct RT-PCR testing on all arrivals before they enter the country.
On Friday, after a sample from the airport was confirmed as being infected by Omicron, health officials said they were tracing the contacts of the 25-year-old unvaccinated woman from Marawila in Chilaw. She had been kept at a treatment centre in the Colombo district when her RT-PCR test done on arrival turned positive. However, by the time, sequencing confirmed that it was Omicron, she had been discharged.
Prof. Neelika Malavige, whose team detected Omicron, told the Sunday Times that of the 96 test samples sequenced on Tuesday, one showed up Omicron. The infection in the others had been caused by Delta.
While the Omicron-infected sample was from the airport, the other samples were from Colombo, Gampaha, Jaffna, Nuwara Eliya and the south.
Referring to mutations, Prof. Malavige said the occurrence of mutations in a virus is a natural phenomenon when the virus replicates. It has been shown that the SARS-CoV-2 virus undergoes around two mutations in a month naturally. A majority of the mutations are harmless.
However, when the virus gets into an immuno-compromised person who is not able to shake off the infection, the virus may mutate extensively acquiring problematic mutations, she said.
When asked about another theory that Omicron with its “unusual” number of mutations, more than 50, may have evolved in another animal species, potentially rodents, she said the thinking was that a rodent might have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus sometime, evolving and accumulating mutations on the spike protein in this species before crossing back to people, described as “reverse zoonosis”: A pathogen jumping from humans to animals, followed by zoonosis, in which a germ passes from animals to humans.
Another report doing the rounds gives the theory that it may have emanated from a COVID-19 patient being treated with the drug Molnupiravir. This drug introduces errors into the virus’s genetic code to slow down its replication. But not many scientists think that the third scenario is likely, she added.
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