A little-known altcoin called omicron surged to a record high as the new coronavirus variant make headlines.
The price of omicron, whose ticker is omic, peaked at $689.12 on Monday, according to CoinGecko data.
The altcoin has no connection to the new strain other than its shared name.
A little-known altcoin called omicron surged to a record high as the new coronavirus variant with the same name makes headlines.
The price of omicron, whose ticker is omic, peaked at $689.12 on Monday, according to CoinGecko data. That means the coin soared as much as 960% from the time the World Health Organization labeled the new variant Friday, when it was hovering just around $65.
On Monday, the digital asset was trading at $162.14 as of 8:31 a.m. ET, roughly 76% lower from its all-time high.
The altcoin has no connection to the B.1.1.529 strain other than its shared name, the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet.
The coin, a decentralized reserve currency protocol that runs on the ethereum layer-two network arbitrum, is backed by several assets, such as stablecoin USD coin, according to an explainer. It is listed solely on decentralized exchange SushiSwap.
And unlike other coins that were borne out of phenomenal events — such as the Squid Game token — omicron already existed before the emergence of the COVID-19 variant last week.
CoinGecko, for instance, has been tracking it since November 11. The crypto data aggregator, however, does not provide further details of the coin’s circulating supply or market capitalization.
While the coin has a website, a Twitter account (joined October 2021), and a discord account, little else is known about it.
“Omicron is a clear sign of a bubble, and while it might be a good way to make a quick return, it is not a good buying option for the long-term investors,” Freddie Evans, sales trader at digital asset broker GlobalBlock told Insider Monday.
Altcoins, in general, have rallied in the past weeks as retail investors direct their attention to newer and lesser-known coins, such as shiba inu and dogecoin, which are increasingly becoming popular for their hefty gains compared to more established assets, like bitcoin.
But King’s College epidemiologist Tim Spector says don’t be surprised if it shows up with different COVID-19 symptoms than those we’ve come to expect.
His latest research suggests that a headache and a runny nose are now two of the leading indicators of a COVID-19 infection across the UK, especially among the young and the partially vaccinated.
Spector’s research draws on daily illness data from more than a million people across the UK, who log into his ZOE app every day and report on how they’re feeling. ZOE’s research suggests about 19,000 people in the UK now catch COVID-19 every day. Most of them are young, and most are also not fully vaccinated.
“It’s evolved to be more infectious, which is what many viruses do,” Spector said, noting that the Delta variant may be roughly twice as infectious as its early predecessors, with each person who catches it transmitting to about six others.
“There’s no hard evidence yet that it’s more lethal or fatal, but because of that extra stickiness, it’s going to still keep breaking through,” he said.
Milder symptoms
Zoe COVID Study / Analysis by ZOE and King’s College London
According to ZOE’s latest data, from June 19, the COVID-19 case rate in the UK is now highest in the 20 to 29 age group.
“We’re seeing this mainly in young people who are unvaccinated, they are three quarters of the cases,” Spector said. “There’s hardly anyone who’s over 60 who’s getting it without a vaccine.”
Most of the people who test positive for COVID-19 in the UK are also weathering the traditional signs of a bad cold – headaches, runny noses, and sore throats – rather than the earlier tell-tale COVID-19 symptoms: shortness of breath or loss of taste.
It’s tough to know, though, if the Delta variant is truly becoming a milder disease, or if this is just how COVID-19 presents among the young, the healthy, and those with vaccine protection.
“Our hope is it’ll get milder,” Spector said. “So it will just become like a cold.”
Now that most of the older adults in the UK are vaccinated, COVID-19 is becoming a disease of the young.
Zoe COVID Study / Analysis by ZOE and King’s College London
The ‘most able and fastest and fittest’ variant
Disease watchers at the World Health Organization agree with Spector – yet another reason to get more of the world’s most vulnerable people vaccinated fast.
“The Delta variant is the most able, and fastest, and fittest,” Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program, said on Monday, stressing that vaccines are still “highly protective against hospitalization and death,” even with variants in play.
“This particular Delta variant is faster, it is fitter, it will pick off the more vulnerable more efficiently than previous variants,” Ryan said. “And we can protect those people now.”
“This virus isn’t going to give up easily.” Spector said. “I don’t think we can be too complacent, particularly in areas of the US that have high non-vaccination rates.”
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky stressed in a White House COVID-19 briefing on Tuesday that “nearly every death” from COVID-19 in the US is now preventable. But time could be running out to ramp up protection, and the race with increasingly fitter variants is not over.
The variant, B.1.617, is “likely to be a variant of concern,” the WHO’s chief scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan told AFP on Saturday, “because it has some mutations which increase transmission.”
Those mutations could also potentially make the variant “resistant to antibodies that are generated by vaccination or by natural infection,” she added.
But even if the current vaccines don’t work quite as well against B.1.617 as they did against the original virus strains that shots were designed to combat, more doses in arms will still help cut down on disease spread, and make COVID-19 cases milder, if and when they do happen. Scientists agree this is one key reason that India needs more vaccines, fast.
The B.1.617 variant spreads rapidly
A senior citizen receives a COVID-19 vaccine at a drive-in vaccine clinic at the Willingdon Sports club on May 8, 2021 in Mumbai, India.
Anshuman Poyrekar/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called B.1.617 a variant of “interest” but hasn’t gone so far as to label it a “variant of concern” yet, like the agency has done for the B.1.1.7 variant (first tracked in the UK), the B.1.351 variant (spotted in South Africa), and the P.1 variant (picked up in Brazil). But, the CDC did recently recommend restricting travel into the US from India, citing worries about more spread of viral variants there, and the White House banned most travel from India to the US on May 4.
“It’s an extremely rapidly spreading variant,” Swaminathan said.
Still, B.1.617 cannot be blamed entirely for the current outbreak in India, as there are other factors playing a major role in the mammoth wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths, including “huge social mixing and large gatherings,” as she pointed out.
“Early signs were missed until it reached the point at which it was taking off vertically,” Swaminathan said of the Indian outbreak. “At that point it’s very hard to suppress, because it’s then involving tens of thousands of people and it’s multiplying at a rate at which it’s very difficult to stop.”
Vaccines can still help control the spread of new viral variants, and make them less deadly
A COVID-19 patient on oxygen support, May 8, 2021, Gurugram, India.
Parveen Kumar/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
Even though the B.1.617 variant is easier to catch than older versions of the coronavirus, more vaccines in arms will still help control its spread.
Leading variant researchers at Ravindra Gupta’s Cambridge University lab recently tweeted fresh evidence of this, saying early data suggests that the variant can be controlled well by the vaccines we already have, even if that protection isn’t perfect.
“The vaccines which are currently approved will protect a majority of people against getting severely ill,” Swaminathan told India Today. “You may still get the infection, but it will prevent you from landing in that ICU.”
“Variants which accumulate a lot of mutations may ultimately become resistant to the current vaccines that we have,” Swaminathan told AFP. “That’s going to be a problem for the whole world.”
India has fully vaccinated just 2.6% of its population so far, according to Bloomberg’s global COVID-19 vaccine tracker, while the US has fully vaccinated roughly a third of its people.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, said on Sunday that vaccine makers need to figure out how to “get literally hundreds of millions of doses” to India, and fast.
“The end game of this all,” he told ABC’s This Week, “is going to be to get people vaccinated.”
Rich countries are hurrying to vaccinate their populations as quickly as possible as they fight to end their coronavirus outbreaks.
But doing that while leaving lower-income countries without vaccines of their own come back to bite them, as numerous public health experts have pointed out.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, noted in February that rich countries with just 16% of the world’s population had purchased 60% of available vaccine supplies.
UNICEF employees are briefed as coronavirus vaccines arrive in Sudan on March 3, 2021.
ASHRAF SHAZLY/AFP via Getty Images
The risk is that, even if a few countries fully vaccinate themselves, the virus can still spread elsewhere.
Allowing it to spread risks it mutating into a more dangerous variants that could resist existing vaccines and prolong the pandemic around the world.
Professor Ken Shadlen, professor of Development Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science described this worry in an interview with Insider.
He pointed to “concern that if we don’t distribute the vaccine in a globally more equal way it’s going to potentially undermine the health benefits of all that we’re doing with lockdowns and vaccines.”
He said that the emergence of a vaccine-conquering variant is by no means guaranteed, but that “it would take a lot of confidence to believe that it’s not going to, if it keeps spreading.”
“We’re gambling and it’s a bit of a race.”
Dr. Michael Osterholm, another expert, agreed with the concerns. He is an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, and also advised President Joe Biden on the coronavirus during his transition.
He told Insider that vaccine equality should already be a “top priority” to save lives around the world.
A man gets a coronavirus vaccine in the Ivory Coast with a shot secured through the COVAX scheme.
Cyrille Bah/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
He said that one of the biggest risks to ending the pandemic is “largely uncontrolled transmission in the low-and-middle-income countries,” even if wealthier nations have finished their vaccine drives.
He said: “We have got to have an immediate international plan to vaccinate the world as quickly as possible.”
The WHO is warning the pandemic won’t end until outbreaks end everywhere. Tedros said in February: “This is not a matter of charity. It’s a matter of epidemiology.”
Already fighting mutant strains
Variants of the virus are causing widespread alarm and changing the course of the pandemic.
A more-contagious strain first identified in the UK was blamed for surges across Europe, and in the US the CDC warned that it could become the dominant strain.
Some countries’ responses are already changing.
The UK has one of the most successful vaccination programs in the world – almost a third of the population has received at least one dose. There are ambitious plans to end all restrictions before the end of June.
The number of people in the UK who had received the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine as of March 2, 2021.
UK goverment
But officials warn that mutations could harm that progress: politicians say the UK is in a “race against evolution.”
The UK is chasing down cases of variants, closely tracking small outbreaks of strains first found in South Africa and Brazil.
Most countries don’t have the resources to react as fast, and it only takes a few mistakes for a new strain to take hold.
Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia’s Norwich School of Medicine, noted that some now argue that lockdowns “should continue for longer than we might think” because of the risk from variants.
He noted that the evidence for that is not yet conclusive.
Existing efforts likely aren’t enough
There is one international effort aimed at reducing this inequality: The WHO’s COVAX scheme, which hopes to distribute 2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses worldwide by the end of 2021.
Its first shots were delivered to Ghana in late February, with shots since arriving in countries like Senegal, Sudan, and Kenya.
But it has been battling underfunding and the problems of limited supply. Even with money to buy doses, COVAX has to contend with the reality that wealthy countries have already reserved almost all supplies for the near future.
The WHO has accused wealthy countries of hoarding doses and driving up prices, frustrating its progress.
That’s adding to the issues created by the shortage of supply globally, leaving it harder for poorer countries to get vaccines and leaving huge populations with little protection.
There’s another big problem with COVAX: Its aims are the “bare minimum,” as Shadlen put it.
It aims to vaccinate around 20% of the populations of 92 countries by the end of the year, far short of the ambitions of the US and others.
Osterholm described COVAX as “a start.” But, he said, “COVAX has never been designed to deliver a vaccine to the entire world in short order.”
Workers unload a shipment of Covid-19 vaccines secured through COVAX in the Ivory Coast in February 2021.
SIA KAMBOU/AFP via Getty Images
“Now we have new data, new information about this thing called variants, which is a game changer. So I think that we’re in a new place. And COVAX to me, while it’s a very positive development, it’s old thinking.”
Instead he called for a plan that involves “everyone, whether it’s Russia or China, or the United States or Europe. We all have the same interest here.”
Tamaryn Nelson, a health advisor to Amnesty International, put it bluntly to Insider: “No one is safe until everyone is safe.”
A big unknown
The key factor is how much risk larger countries are willing to tolerate. Osterholm, the expert who advised Biden, said that there is no way of knowing ahead of time if a new, scary variant will appear.
Researchers are doing what they can to counter this, working on booster on booster shots to fight specific variants. But the development takes time and money, and is itself not guaranteed to work.
The safer option is to get rid of the virus as widely as possible.
Osterholm said: “I always remind people we are a year into this pandemic, but the variants of concern have only been around for about three months.”
“All this has happened in three months: What’s it going to be like three to six months from now?”
“We’re in a chess match with this virus right now. It’s making moves we’ve never seen before.”
Biotechnology company Moderna protocol files for COVID-19 vaccinations are kept at the Research Centers of America in Hollywood, Florida, on August 13, 2020.
Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images
Vaccine nationalism, in which countries prioritize their domestic needs at the expense of others, will have significant global economic consequences.
As long as the COVID-19 virus is not under control in all regions of the world, there will continue to be a global economic cost associated with the disease.
Major economies actually have more to gain by helping to make an effective COVID-19 vaccine widely available globally.
Marco Hafner is a senior economist and research leader at RAND Europe working on employment, education and social policy research.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
As more COVID-19 vaccines are approved by regulatory bodies, attention will undoubtedly turn to the rollout. Vaccine nationalism – which occurs when national governments sign bilateral agreements with pharmaceutical manufacturers to supply their own populations with vaccines first – seems inevitable. While this approach is, to an extent, rational and will undoubtedly have domestic political advantages, there could be not only human consequences, but also economic ones as well.
International institutions such as the World Health Organization, the United Nations and GAVI – the vaccine alliance – among others, are trying to support the multilateral option to globally coordinate the COVID-19 vaccine effort. But this approach is not supported so far by some of the world’s leading economies, such as the US, who have been reluctant to commit and instead pursued direct bilateral deals with vaccine manufacturers.
While true that a vaccine nationalism approach would help improve the economic situation of those countries that can inoculate their populations, their economies would still depend on the concurrent recovery in other regions that have not been able to sufficiently immunize their populations against the virus. For example, more than 4% of US exports go to low or lower-middle income countries, including the Philippines, Vietnam or El Salvador.
There are key sectors that will not be able to bounce back until the global population is vaccinated. Travel, tourism and transportation are just three examples of these sectors that rely on a globally connected world to be fully functional. Only vaccinating the populations of individual countries will not be enough to see them return to full financial health, thereby prolonging the economic cost of COVID-19 for the world.
A RAND Europe report analyzing the costs of vaccine nationalism has the numbers to back this up. The research shows that given the enormous costs of the current disruption to the global economy, the introduction of a vaccine, and shared global access to vaccines, would have substantial economic benefits. These benefits would be significantly reduced by vaccine nationalism.
For example, if the vaccine-producing countries, such as the US, EU-27, UK, China, India and Russia, can inoculate a sufficiently large share of their populations, the estimated loss for the world economy in GDP would reduce from 3.7% to 1.3%. However, the lack of access to vaccines for the rest of the world would still result in a GDP loss of up to $1.2 trillion per year, or about $103 billion a month.
The large number of bilateral deals between national governments and producers of current vaccine candidates has resulted in a patchwork of agreements which could affect the pricing of vaccines as wealthier countries bid for limited vaccine supplies. Eventually this could lead to the pricing out or denying, at least initially, of governments of less wealthy countries’ access to some vaccines.
In fact, there is a strong argument that the major economies have more to gain by helping to make an effective vaccine widely available globally.
Based on estimates by Oxfam International in 2020, it would cost $25 billion to supply lower-income countries with vaccines. The US, the UK, the EU and other high-income countries combined could lose about $119 billion a year if the poorest countries are denied a supply. But if these high-income countries would provide the finance for the supply of vaccines, there could be a benefit-to-cost ratio of 4.8 to 1. This means that for every $1 spent, high-income countries would get back about $4.80. This demonstrates the economic incentives to global coordination in vaccine production and distribution.
The costs of global vaccine development and distribution pale in comparison to the enormous cost of economic disruption globally, with governments spending trillions to support workers and sectors severely impacted by the pandemic. This speaks to renewed and substantially larger investment in supporting global vaccine distribution. Ultimately, it could be in the national economic interest to cooperate globally.
Marco Hafner is a senior economist and research leader at RAND Europe.
