Latest cases, hopefully this turns out to be a minor variant in terms of CFR, hospitalization, etc or we are screwed. If you read the post a page or so back where two scientist were discussing among each other you can see how alarmed they were.
ETA
At 7.30 a.m. on Wednesday, Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at Scripps Research in San Diego, received a message on Slack: “This variant is completely insane.” Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh was reacting to a new SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence found in three samples collected in Botswana on 11 November and one picked up a week later in a traveler from South Africa to Hong Kong.
Andersen looked at the data and then replied: “Holy shit—that is quite something. The length of that branch...” A few minutes later he added: “Just had a look at the list of mutations—so nuts.”
They were talking about what is now called Omicron, a new variant of concern, and the long branch Andersen noticed refers to its distance to every other known virus on SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary tree. The variant seemed to have picked up dozens of mutations, many of them known to be important in evading immunity or increasing transmissibility, with no intermediate sequences in the database of millions of viral genomes.