[With countries trying to close
their doors to the new coronavirus variant, southern African officials note
that the West’s hoarding of vaccines helped create their struggle in the first
place.]
By Benjamin Mueller and Declan Walsh
A new coronavirus variant called
Omicron, first detected in Botswana, put governments on edge after South Africa
announced a surge of cases this week, plunging countries into the most
uncertain moment of the pandemic since the highly contagious Delta variant took
hold this spring.
As in the early days of Delta,
political alarm spread quickly across the world, with officials trading blame
over how the failures of the global vaccination effort were allowing the virus
to mutate, even as researchers warned that the true threat of the new variant
was not yet clear.
Bearing a worrying number of
mutations that researchers fear could make it spread easily, Omicron was
spotted on Saturday in patients in Britain, Germany and Italy, leaving in its
wake what scientists estimated to be thousands of cases in southern Africa and
tens or hundreds more globally. One nation after another shut its doors to
southern Africa even as they spurned public health measures that scientists
said were far more urgently needed to take on the new variant.
Australia, Thailand and Sri Lanka
were among the latest countries on Saturday to join the United States, Britain
and the European Union in banning travelers from South Africa and nearby
countries.
Israel announced the world’s
strictest ban to date, sealing its borders to all foreigners for 14 days after
one case was confirmed in the country.
“The key here is caution and
minimal risks until we know more,” Prime Minister Naftali Bennet of Israel said
at a news conference just after midnight local time on Sunday.
Health officials in the Netherlands
on Saturday announced that 61 passengers on two flights from South Africa had
tested positive for the virus, the latest indication of how difficult it might
be to stop the variant from crossing borders.
The cascade of travel closures
triggered a wave of resentment among Africans who believed that the continent
was yet again bearing the brunt of panicked policies from Western countries,
which had failed to deliver vaccines and the resources needed to administer
them.
Richer countries, having already
hoarded vaccines for much of 2021, were now penalizing parts of the world that
they had starved of shots in the first place, scientists said.
“Told you so,” said Francois
Venter, a researcher at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg,
referring to warnings from African researchers that delaying vaccinations there
risked the emergence of new variants. “It feels like these rich countries have
learned absolutely nothing in terms of support.”
The sense of outrage was most
visceral in South Africa, where business leaders predicted a dire economic
toll, especially on tourism. In the arrivals halls of Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo
International airport, Ronald Masiwa, a tour operator, watched with dread as
the information board flipped to red, displaying cancellation notices. Three clients
had already canceled trips overnight, and he feared that many more would
follow.
Some health officials said that the
travel bans may buy some time to figure out how to deal with the new variant.
But just as border closures a year ago did little to stop the spread of an
earlier coronavirus variant from Britain, scientists said, the latest travel
shutdowns had likely come too late.
Scientists worried that the
restrictions would discourage other nations from reporting variant cases, out
of fear of being slapped with travel bans. Border closures have provoked debate
during a succession of public health crises, including the Ebola outbreak in
2014, with global health officials warning that such bans can interrupt the
flow of medical supplies and do economic damage that makes countries reluctant
to report health threats.
The chaotic introduction of the
closures in Amsterdam on Friday left some 600 passengers on two flights from
South Africa crammed into planes and then unventilated rooms for about 30
hours. Those who avoided hotel quarantines by testing negative scattered to
other destinations after receiving results around 3 a.m. on Saturday.
“You close down the boundary with
Africa, then you close the boundary with Belgium, then you close the boundary
with somewhere else,” said Alessandro Vespignani, a Northeastern University
professor who has studied travel restrictions from early 2020 and advised
government agencies in recent days on responses to the latest variant. “But
every time you close it, it’s a little late.”
It remains unclear whether the
Omicron variant will transmit as easily as global health officials fear. The
variant may simply have been in the right place during a surge of new
infections in South Africa, making it appear more contagious than it really is.
But experts said the border closures
would wreak havoc in African countries that were counting on reopening. In
South Africa, December is traditionally the high season for tourism, one of the
country’s biggest industries, and operators had been banking on a surge in
visitors from Britain, which had removed South Africa from its “red list” only
last month.
“This is devastating,” said David
Frost, chief executive officer of the Southern Africa Tourism Services
Association. “Many companies have been hanging on by their fingernails, and
this is going to wipe them out. It’s going to be dire for conservation, and it’s
going to be dire for people in rural areas where tourism is the only economic
generator.”
South Africa’s number of daily
infections — 2,828 on Friday — was a small fraction of case counts in countries
with similarly sized populations, like Germany and Britain, not to mention the
United States. For Mr. Frost, the hurried measures were the mark of a blatant
double standard.
Just over 10 percent of people in
Africa have received one dose of a vaccine, compared with 64 percent in North
America and 62 percent in Europe.
For the countries imposing travel
bans, scientists said, far more consequential than delaying the arrival of new
Omicron cases was the question of what they would do with whatever time they
had bought themselves to respond.
At home, scientists said, those
countries should ramp up testing and vaccinations and help infected people
isolate, especially given the difficulties they were already having containing
the Delta variant. Scientists pleaded with countries to match those efforts
globally, including with aid to southern Africa for their health systems and
vaccination and variant-tracking efforts.
“If all we do is a travel ban, and
we don’t increase testing at airports or provide resources for people to
isolate if they do test positive so they can justify missing work — all of that
would have to be happening to reduce community transmission,” said Joseph
Fauver, an assistant professor studying genomic surveillance at the University
of Nebraska Medical Center.
After decades of skepticism toward
border closures among global health officials, Covid-19 forced experts to
re-examine their views, said Alexandra Phelan, a professor studying global
health policy at Georgetown University. “We gained a bit of nuance, and
realized that travel restrictions have a potential role to play in slowing the
spread of a new respiratory disease, even though it doesn’t stop it,” she said.
Still, Dr. Vespignani and his
colleagues have shown that even the strictest travel restrictions only modestly
delay the spread of the virus without other efforts to cut transmission. And
whereas countries had some hope in early 2020 of tracing the contacts of
patients from abroad, sequencing the virus takes too long to allow health
officials to pick out people infected with the Omicron variant for special
containment measures.
“They get dispersed in a sea of
thousands and thousands of infections,” Dr. Vespignani said of any new cases of
the Omicron variant. “It’s a very, very, very tough situation.”
The latest variant has already
shown signs of spreading locally beyond southern Africa. A patient in Belgium,
for instance, had no connections with southern Africa, having traveled recently
to Egypt, officials said.
Several scientists said they
suspected that the variant had been spreading undetected in countries with
lackluster sequencing efforts before it surfaced in Botswana and South Africa,
giving it more time to scatter globally. Nevertheless, European nations did not
find the variant until after South Africa alerted them to it, demonstrating the
gaps in their own surveillance efforts.
The variant had plenty of
opportunities to spread: In November, there were 334 flights scheduled out of
southern Africa into Europe, with a capacity of nearly 100,000 seats. And three
dozen flights were scheduled from Johannesburg into the United States this
month.
Given the uneven global sequencing
efforts, Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, said
that it was difficult to target individual countries for border closures. She
warned that travel bans created a false sense of security, giving cover to
elected leaders who wanted to avoid more difficult choices.
“The notion of having a global map
of where the variants are and aren’t is just fantasy,” she said. “I don’t think
the travel bans really have much of an impact, other than answering the
political pressures that inevitably arise when a new variant emerges.”
Shabir Madhi, a virologist at
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, cautioned that the Omicron
variant could yet fizzle out, as other seemingly worrisome versions of the
virus had done. He said it was a reflection of a lack of political and economic
power that southern Africa was so quickly cut off by wealthy countries despite
the uncertain evidence.
With roughly a third of South
Africans vaccinated, officials there blame a number of factors, including
vaccine hesitancy caused by rampant online misinformation. Some critics have
blamed a bungled government response. For now, South Africa has far more
vaccine doses than it can distribute in time, forcing senior health officials
to defer some planned deliveries.
Other African countries where
shortages have eased are also reporting difficulties getting vaccines into
people’s arms. Many lack the necessary freezers and other storage capacity.
Last month, Uganda warned that two-thirds of the 9 million vaccines it had
received risked expiring by the end of the year.
In the United States, health
officials say they are better equipped to track variants than earlier in the
pandemic. Scientists can identify Omicron with a standard nasal swab test,
giving them a leg up in tracking the spread of the variant.
But the United States is suffering
so many daily infections that many samples are being overlooked. And there are
pockets of the country where relatively few cases are being sequenced. In the
last 90 days, for instance, Massachusetts sequenced a fifth of all coronavirus
cases in the state, according to an online
sequencing database. Texas and Florida, on the other hand, did so for only
four percent of cases.
“I’m definitely more confident in
our ability to track and detect the virus,” Dr. Fauver said. “What I’m not
confident in is our ability to control transmission.”
Reporting was contributed
by Jason Horowitz, Lynsey Chutel, Stephanie Nolen, Sui-Lee
Wee, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Niraj
Chokshi and Claire Moses.
