The ongoing Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is currently driven by the highly infectious Omicron variant of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which was first detected in Botswana on November 11, 2021 and subsequently spread as the dominant variant (https://covid19.who.int/). Since then, Omicron has evolved into distinct sub-lineages and descendant lineages [1], characterised by different mutations in the spike (S) protein compared to the wild type (WT) ancestral strain, and further mutations involving the other open reading frames (ORFs).
