‘Seems [like] Covid-19 won’t allow us to start travelling till 2030,” Thourn Sinan, chairman of Pacific Asia Travel Association (Cambodia chapter), muttered as global anxiety rose over Omicron, the latest variant discovered by South African scientists late November.

Since then, the variant has been detected in around 20 countries including those in Africa and Europe, as well as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Hong Kong and Japan.

“This is the newest threat to our industry … everyone knows that Cambodia is just re-opening without quarantine but now another crisis [has hit],” he told The Post.

News of the variant gripped the industry as Cambodia imposed a ban on travellers from 10 Omicron-affected countries in Africa and those who visited these countries in the last three weeks.

However, it retained the no-quarantine policy for vaccinated travellers from other parts of the world.

At the time of writing, Prime Minister Hun Sen asked the Ministry of Health to consider lifting the travel ban on African nations, saying that a compulsory polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test on arrival was adequate to keep the variant at bay.

Prior to the ban, Ministry of Health spokesman Or Vandine assured that there was “no need to panic”, although she echoed World Health Organisation (WHO) representative Dr Li Ailan’s warning over the “potential arrival of the variant” in Cambodia.

“The variant has a large number of mutations with possibly increased risk of reinfection and high risk of importation and spread, and managing uncertainties or unknown is a challenge,” Dr Li said in a tweet earlier this week, urging everyone to “be ready”.

Separately, Russian virologist Anatoly Altshtein of Moscow’s Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, Sputnik V vaccine developer, told tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda or KP that Omicron could “spell an end to the pandemic”.

Russia state-owned media portal rt.com, which republished the article, wrote that Altshtein based his hypothesis on the high mutation rate, “more than the Delta variant”, saying that it was “too many”, which essentially meant that the virus possessed an “unstable genome”.

“As a rule, this sort of infectious agent becomes less dangerous because evolutionary, an overwhelming number of mutations leads to a weakening of the virus’s ability to cause a disease,” he said.

In South Africa, where the variant was discovered, experts reported that patients infected with Omicron-variant SARS-CoV-2, exhibited mild symptoms although they cautioned against drawing firm conclusions, Reuters wrote.

Read full article: Phnom Penh Post

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