South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday said he is scheduled to convene a meeting of the National Coronavirus Command Council on Tuesday to discuss measures needed to tackle the new Covid-19 Omicron subvariant, XBB.1.5, reported The Eyewitness News.
The highly transmissible XBB.1.5 Covid sub-variant was detected in the Western Cape last week. It has also been recorded in the United States and the United Kingdom.
During an interview with Eyewitness News, President Ramaphosa said although the subvariant was highly transmissible, South Africans need not panic. He said the health department and scientists would suggest preventative measures specific to the newly-detected variant.
“We are agile enough to want to have that meeting tomorrow, and thereafter there will be information that will be shared with the rest of the country,” the South African president said.
He assured that the country has learned from the past pandemic to have greater agility and ability to preempt what the reactions will be.
South Africa recorded over three million Covid-19 infections at the height of the pandemic – the highest number of confirmed cases by any African country. Some 48% of the eligible population is vaccinated.
The XBB.1.5 omicron subvariant is the most contagious version of Covid-19 yet, but it doesn’t appear to make people sicker, according to the World Health Organization.
Tulio de Oliveira, head of a gene sequencing institute at Stellenbosch University, wrote on Twitter that the variant was discovered in gene sequencing carried out by the university researchers from a Dec. 27 sample.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, said the sub-variant has been detected in 29 countries so far but it could be even more widespread.
Notably, the XBB.1.5 subvariant is yet to be identified in China, which is currently undergoing a surge in infections after relaxing strict controls that limited the impact of previous waves of Covid in the country.
Meanwhile, the South African government has reportedly made an appeal to the people to vaccinate and get booster shots to enhance their immunity.
