Tracking omicron: Canadian scientists race to understand new variant

Canadian scientists are racing to understand more about the threat of the omicron variant — how fast it spreads, whether it causes more or less severe illness, and if it can escape previous immunity to COVID-19 — but it could take weeks before a full picture emerges.

There have been dozens of suspected and confirmed cases of omicron reported throughout Canada in recent days, but several have no known link to international travel and have prompted concerns the variant could already be driving outbreaks here.

Health officials in London, Ont., confirmed omicron is now linked to a cluster of at least 40 COVID-19 cases in the city associated with schools, child care centres and a church, with 171 high-risk close contacts identified. 

And countries such as South Africa, Denmark and England are already reporting widespread community transmission of the variant, with growing evidence that omicron was already spreading in Europe before it was identified by researchers in southern Africa. 

But the capacity to analyze this new variant and quickly share information about it both in Canada and globally has grown dramatically from a year ago, when the alpha and beta variants of concern first emerged.

"The most important thing for Canadians to know is that we have spent more than a year building the capacity for genomic surveillance," said Catalina Lopez-Correa, executive director of The Canadian COVID Genomics Network (CanCOGeN). 

"But it's really early days for us to predict the clinical outcomes, the transmissibility, also we don't know if this variant will be as fast taking over like delta … all this we can only see with time."

Marc-André Langlois, a molecular virologist at the University of Ottawa who heads the Coronavirus Variants Rapid Response Network (CoVaRR-Net), says labs across the country are working tirelessly to conduct experiments on omicron. 

"What's changed is the fact that we've managed to bring our academic laboratory assets together," Langlois said. "We have epidemiologists, we have modellers, we have immunologists, virologists and they've all come together." 

Guillaume Bourque, director of bioinformatics at the McGill Genome Centre in Montreal, says Canada is also now able to act on the data more quickly.

"Now we have the system in place," Bourque said. "We want to make it available to public health and to the scientific community as fast as possible, so that people can really start working on trying to understand the variant and then give advice to public health in terms of the best approach to try to contain it."

Langlois says that the early data coming out of southern Africa on omicron is useful — but limited in scope.

"That snapshot is very, very different to the Canadian landscape. So the information we have now is indicative, but it's not a true reflection of what's going to happen when this variant spreads in Canada," he said. "This is why we need a Canadian network to look at the Canadian situation."

Langlois said the first tests will look at whether antibodies from COVID-19 vaccines will still neutralize the virus compared to other variants, but figuring out how much of an impact omicron could have on vaccine effectiveness at a population level will take time.