‘Best hope’ for containing the new variant is worldwide vaccine campaign where rates are low, public health experts say.

As new cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant are uncovered across the globe and threaten to spread in America, US officials are reacting by urging vaccinations and boosters instead of imposing restrictions which have increasingly provoked political fights.

But the US should quickly invest in other tools as well, experts said, including testing, genomic sequencing and surveillance, better communication, and a strong focus on global vaccine equity to prevent the emergence of new variants.

All of that would prepare America better to deal with a variant that many experts suspect is probably already inside the country, even if undetected so far. Read more at the Guardian.