As the port city of Durban eases into South Africa’s annual summer holiday season, scientists at a virology laboratory at the Africa Health Research Institute are working around the clock.
The discovery of the omicron coronavirus variant by South African and Botswanan scientists last month has lent urgency to efforts to isolate the virus and test its ability to evade vaccines the world is pinning its hopes on to end a two-year pandemic.
The goal is to figure out "what happened? How does it happen? What can we do to decrease it,” said Alex Sigal, 51, who runs the lab that was the first to isolate the beta variant, the coronavirus strain that’s been most successful in getting past inoculations. We "then figure out a way to quickly adjust our responses,” he said.