Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-1-2022
Publication Title
Microorganisms
Volume
10
Issue
2
First page number:
1
Last page number:
7
Abstract
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) first emerged in Wuhan city in December 2019, and became a grave global concern due to its highly infectious nature. The Severe Acute Respiratory Coronavirus-2, with its predecessors (i.e., MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV) belong to the family of Coronaviridae. Reportedly, COVID-19 has infected 344,710,576 people around the globe and killed nearly 5,598,511 persons in the short span of two years. On November 24, 2021, B.1.1.529 strain, later named Omicron, was classified as a Variant of Concern (VOC). SARS-CoV-2 has continuously undergone a series of unprecedented mutations and evolved to exhibit varying characteristics. These mutations have largely occurred in the spike (S) protein (site for antibody binding), which attribute high infectivity and transmissibility characteristics to the Omicron strain. Although many studies have attempted to understand this new challenge in the COVID-19 strains race, there is still a lot to be demystified. Therefore, the purpose of this review was to summarize the structural or virologic characteristics, burden, and epidemiology of the Omicron variant and its potential to evade the immune response.
Keywords
B.1.1.529; Cell-mediated immunity; COVID-19; Monoclonal antibodies; Omicron; South Africa; Vaccines
Disciplines
Diseases | Infectious Disease
File Format
File Size
282 KB
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Repository Citation
Arora, S.,
Grover, V.,
Saluja, P.,
Algarni, Y.,
Saquib, S.,
Asif, S.,
Batra, K.,
Alshahrani, M. Y.,
Das, G.,
Jain, R.,
Ohri, A.
(2022).
Literature Review of Omicron: A Grim Reality Amidst COVID-19.
Microorganisms, 10(2),
1-7.
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms10020451