Panic as new Omicron variant found -Mutant strain’s ‘sister’ could be even HARDER to track

He added: “It has enough genes to be classified as Omicron, but we don’t know enough about it for what that means as far as clinical severity, vaccine effectiveness.

“What we do know is that Omicron is more infectious and more transmissible.”

Peter Collignon, microbiologist at the Australian National University, told the Guardian: “It is mainly at the moment an issue about the technicalities on how they are picked up.

“If the genes have been deleted, and there’s another lineage where the gene hasn’t been deleted, you may not think it is Omicron when in fact it is.”