The senior South African doctor who discovered the COVID-19 variant Omicron says it is already "seeded" in the UK — but there is no need to panic.
South African Medical Association (SAMA) chairwoman Angelique Coetzee reassured the BBC's Andrew Marr that the variant causes "extremely mild" illness and nobody had yet been admitted to hospital with it.
"I think you already have it there in your country, and you're not even knowing it", she said, "because you are seeing a lot of Delta cases".
Coetzee said the appearance of the new variant was easily masked by more severe strains, and was only detected in her country thanks to a lull in cases of the previously-predominant Delta variant.
"Remember we had a break, we had about eight to ten weeks break between our last wave and this new variant coming onto the market now", she said.
"For us to see there's something different is easy. Your doctors might be more focused on the Delta variant and missing this, because it's easy to miss this", the doctors' union chief stressed. "If it wasn't for the fact that we had not seen a lot of COVID cases, we would have also missed it".
Coetzee said she first encountered the new variant on 18 November, describing its "unusual symptoms" in a male patient about 30 years old.
The patient described feeling "extremely tired for the past two days" with "body aches and pains with a bit of a headache", and complaining of "not really a sore throat, more a scratchy type of description" and "no cough and no loss of smell and taste".
Health Secretary Sajid Javid, appearing on the same programme, ruled out a return to working from home as a response to the new variant.
He confirmed that the return to compulsory mask-wearing in shops and on public transport, announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Saturday evening, would come into force on Tuesday.
And Javid told Trevor Phillips of Sky News: "People should continue with their plans as normal for Christmas, I think it's going to be a great Christmas".
Only three cases of the new variant have so far been identified in the UK, one of those in a person who has since left the country.
Opposition Labour Party Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy dismissed South Africa's protests over the travel ban imposed by the UK and other western countries on the region, calling it "absolutely the right thing to do".
But she said there were still "outstanding holes in our defences", suggesting that international travellers should be forced to have COVID-19 tests before leaving the country as well as on arrival.
British Medical Association council chairman Dr Chaand Nagpaul urged the government to copy European countries that have reimposed unpopular lockdown measures over the autumn and winter months.