 You're watching News Made Easy. I'm Anindji Chakravarti. Today I'm going to talk about the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus. What do we know about it so far? It's a cause for concern for health authorities across the world because there is talk that this might evade our immune system. It might manage to go past the immunity that vaccines have developed for us and that's a cause for concern. And we know that it has been first identified through testing in South Africa and now it's spread to different parts of the world and of course wherever it's spread there are travel restrictions that are taking place but it's still not stopping the spread. To understand that we have to understand these things called spike proteins, we've all heard about it these spikes, these things that you see that are there on the coronavirus's outer shell and what does that do? When the virus comes nearer, human cell which is inside our body it manage the spikes, help it latch on to the membrane and break through and enter the cell and then it replicates inside. Now what does our immune system do when we get a COVID vaccine because these vaccines generally target the spike proteins? The immune system essentially creates antibodies to these spikes. The antibodies recognize these spikes and then they engulf. So this is what happens. Again, I'm showing you the same thing, the coronavirus comes nearby but what happens is that the antibodies come and engulf it and then the coronavirus is unable to enter the cell and it dies right there. But what happens if there are mutations in these spike proteins? And here what I'm representing here is not a scientific representation. This is just a visual representation for you to understand, to get a sense of what it is. This is not how it happened. But if there are mutations in the spike proteins and let's assume for visualization, again not in a scientific sense but just for visualization then let's assume that the shape of those spikes has changed. And now what happens is when this new different mutated coronavirus comes the antibodies in our body are not able to recognize these spikes anymore. They're not able to recognize these specific proteins because they've changed. Some have been deleted, some have become different and the antibodies in our body are unable, our immune system no longer recognizes it. So again what happens is that this coronavirus can enter the cell and replicate there even though we might have got immunity to the original coronaviruses or various variants of it. And the cause for concern is that the Omicron variant shows 30 mutations in just the spike proteins itself, 30 mutations which are very significant because some of those mutations make it easier for the virus to enter this human cells. Some of them actually make them even more infectious and one particular mutation which is being identified, which is believed to help it evade the immune system. Even if we have antibodies to the coronavirus to SARS-CoV-2 it's able to evade it because our antibodies cannot recognize the new spike proteins on this virus. This obviously could make vaccines ineffective or at least less effective and vaccine manufacturers are admitting that right now. But these are early days and the interesting thing is and one could take hope from that. Again early days remember is that at least the South African health authorities have said that essentially what you get from this variant is mild symptoms, headaches, nausea, mild fever which lasts for a few days but not anything significant. But there has been a jump in hospitalization rate in South Africa and only future testing, long-term testing can tell us whether this will, that this is all because of this new variant. And the thing is that the health experts are saying that it's too early for us to decide how this Omicron variant is going to behave. So all you can do is continue to take precautions and in fact increase precautions if you thought that it's over at least in India. So mask up, get your COVID shots if you haven't got them yet, avoid crowds. It's tempting to go into the crowd saying it's over, everyone's doing it, let's do it as well. Avoid it, go out only if necessary because the only way to fight this right now is to prevent it, prevention is better than cure because we know our health systems are poor and even if the state governments and central governments and authorities try their best if this becomes like it happened in the second wave then we again have a huge problem. That's the show for today, keep watching news click, subscribe to it, share this video and do like it as well.