South Africa Complains Of 'Being Punished' For Detecting The New Variant 'Omicron'

South Africa in a statement said that the country is “being punished” for detecting the omicron variant of the coronavirus which is categorised as the “variant of concern” by the WHO on Friday. 

New Delhi: South Africa in a statement on Saturday said that the country is “being punished” for detecting the omicron variant of the coronavirus which is categorised as the “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization on Friday. 

Soon after South Africa alerted the WHO about the new variant, many countries imposed travel restrictions on flights from several African nations in an effort to shut out the virus. However, the travel restrictions are supposed to harm the tourism industry and businesses in South Africa, stated the Foreign Ministry.

The statement released by the ministry said that imposing travel restrictions “is akin to punishing South Africa for its advanced genomic sequencing and the ability to detect new variants quicker.”

“Excellent science should be applauded and not punished,” added the statement. The variant was detected on Thursday, and more cases were found later in Israel, Belgium, Hong Kong, Botswana, and the UK. Consequently, the countries announced travel restrictions on several African countries. 

It further added that despite the cases being found in other countries, the reaction towards South Africa is different. “Each of those cases have had no recent links with Southern Africa, but the reaction to those countries is starkly different to cases in Southern Africa,” the statement added.

The variant was declared as “variant of concern” and named as Omicron by the WHO on Friday which said that the virus might be highly transmissible, and it may take a few weeks to study its impact on the vaccine efficacy. The WHO statement was followed by more travel bans. 

The South African government’s statement insisted that their “capacity to test and its ramped-up vaccination programme, backed up by a world-class scientific community should give our global partners the comfort that we are doing as well as they are in managing the pandemic.”

On the concerns of the damage that the travel restrictions may cause to the country financially, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor said, “Our immediate concern is the damage that these restrictions are causing to families, the travel and tourism industries and business.”