The Wall Street Journal reports:

Over coffee at his office on Tuesday, Tulio de Oliveira, director of South Africa’s Center for Epidemic Response and Innovation, let a colleague in on a secret.

“There’s something going on,” he told Alex Sigal, a virologist growing coronaviruses at a South African laboratory. “They’ve found a variant they’ve never seen before.”

For days, case numbers in the nation had been rising rapidly. Puzzled lab technicians had been getting back Covid-19 tests that were positive, but showing an element was missing on the virus’s telltale spike protein, potentially signaling that the virus had undergone another change. Scientists sequenced the virus’s genome and found more than 50 modifications from the original coronavirus.

On Thursday, Prof. de Oliveira delivered the news to South Africa’s president: A new variant with potentially worrying characteristics was driving infections in the country. That same day, South Africa’s health minister and scientists announced the findings.

One day later, the World Health Organization named the new virus configuration Omicron and declared it a variant of concern. Never before had a variant moved so quickly from first detection to a WHO declaration.

The speedy detection and the rapid response of global health authorities shows how the world’s fight against Covid-19 has evolved. Scientists are now focused on finding new variants. In the case of Omicron, one was beginning to spread in a nation with the resources to identify it—and the political will to announce it to the world.

The ramifications of South Africa’s openness also became apparent. Even though the danger posed by the new variant isn’t yet fully understood, governments in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas immediately restricted travel from southern Africa.

Uncertainties aside, investors recognized that Omicron could upend expectations that most of the world is gradually returning to normalcy, sending stocks, oil prices and government-bond yields lower. [Continue reading…]