Galveston researchers scour the globe for omicron sample
The Galveston County Daily News, December 3, 2021
Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch began engineering their own copy of the new COVID variant in local labs with genome data shared online. At the same time, researchers were working to get their hands on an isolate of the virus from a person confirmed to have been infected with it. The expert advice is to stay calm about omicron. “I think we have some concern, but it’s too early to worry a lot about this,” said Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections & Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “The bad news is that this is a variant with a lot of mutations.”