Hi, I'm Erica Pandy, and welcome to Axios Recap, where we dig into one big story.

It's Wednesday, December 1st, and we're focused on the Elmachron COVID variant.

It was only a matter of time. The first U.S. case of the variant has been detected in California.

The patient, who was fully vaccinated, was recently traveling from South Africa and is now experiencing mild symptoms.

It's been a week since the Omicrone variant was reported to the World Health Organization.

Immediately, global leaders sprang into action. They put new travel

restrictions in place. They reintroduce mass mandates. They doubled down on vaccination campaigns.

And they discouraged any travel, particularly for people 60 and older. But there isn't actually

that much we know yet about this variant. Although the WHO says it may be more transmissible than the other strains of COVID that we've seen.

Even with so many unknowns, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson are already racing to adapt their shots to better protect against Omicron.

So are we acting too quickly when there's little information, or is the

swift action we're seeing from countries and companies enough to keep Omicron from turning into

another delta wave? And what does the latest variant tell us about our future living alongside

this virus? In a moment, I'll be joined by Dr. Richard Besser. He's a former acting director of the CDC, and we'll break down what we know about the new variant and what comes next.

We're joined now by Dr. Richard Besser, former acting director of the CDC.

So first things first, and this new variant was reported November 24th exactly a week ago. What do we know about it at this point?

Scientists in South Africa were able to detect a new variant, a new strain. And what they saw when they

looked at that strain were quite a number of mutations in parts of the virus. And they were seeing a number of these cases in South Africa.

And so it raised the concern of could this be a variant, could this be a strain for which

individuals who've already had COVID aren't protected because it's so different from

the strains that were seen before?

And what they did is what we hope any country would do, and that's they shared the information, and they shared

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