No one should be surprised there’s another COVID variant on the loose, and yet seemingly, everyone is. The variant, named Omicron (the fifteenth letter in the Greek alphabet), was first reported to the World Health Organisation (WHO) by South Africa on November 24th. Unlike its name would suggest, Omicron is the seventh COVID-19 variant of concern—but a pandemic-fatigued global public could be forgiven for thinking it’s the twentieth.
