The first case of the Omicron variant was confirmed in Iowa on Thursday, according to the Iowa Department of Public Health. The State Hygienic Laboratory (SHL) detected the COVID-19 variant in a sample for an unvaccinated resident of Black Hawk County, who is under the age of 18.
The person has no symptoms, but was tested due to potential exposure during recent travel, IDPH said.
Since late November, SHL has been selecting 300 COVID-19 test samples every week for further testing in an attempt to detect coronavirus variants.
The Omicron variant was first reported to the World Health Organization on Nov. 24, after being detected in a test sample collected in Botswana on Nov. 11 and in one collected in South Africa three days later. On Nov. 24, WHO designated Omicron a “variant of concern.” The first case was detected in the United States on Dec. 1. According to the CDC, the variant has so far been detected in 23 states.
WHO defines a variant of concern as one “for which there is evidence of an increase in transmissibility, more severe disease (for example, increased hospitalizations or deaths), significant reduction in neutralization by antibodies generated during previous infection or vaccination, reduced effectiveness of treatments or vaccines, or diagnostic detection failures.”
So far, the data suggests Omicron does not regularly produce severe illness. And while the standard two-shot vaccinations from Pfizer and Moderna, and the one-shot Johnson and Johnson, do provide protection against Omicron, the new variant may be able to evade the antibodies generated by those vaccines more easily than Delta, laboratory studies published this week indicate. But researchers believe the increase in antibodies created by getting a vaccine booster shot will likely prove to be an effective barrier against Omicron.
“The message is fairly consistent, because I think the message is that boosters are probably the best thing we can do in the immediate future,” Benjamin Murrell, a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, told reporters this week.
Delta remains the dominant variant in Iowa and throughout the United States. According to the CDC COVID Data Tracker, all 99 counties in Iowa are currently experiencing a high rate of virus spread.
