In November 2021, a team of researchers headed by Professor Tulio de Oliveira discovered the Omicron variant. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists in South Africa were doing research on epidemics. Yet not everyone approves of their work.

Researchers in Botswana and South Africa, who separately identified the COVID-19 omicron variant, are the winners of the 2022 German Africa Award.

The revamped vaccines by Moderna and BioNTech-Pfizer specifically target the currently dominant BA.4/BA.5 omicron subvariants. The jabs are part of a fall vaccination campaign that could begin within days.

Regulators in the UK are again the first in the world to provisionally approve a new COVID vaccine for use. The latest shot, from Moderna in the US, is supposed to offer protection against the Omicron variant as well.

Even as it said Germany likely passed the peak of omicron infections, the Robert Koch Institute warned coronavirus cases remained high. Despite this, the country is considering relaxing quarantine rules.

Hong Kong is facing its toughest test yet in its "Dynamic Zero Covid" strategy. The number of cases this year is now higher than the number of infections seen in both 2020 and 2021. The city's health system is under pressure, suffering from a lack of hospital beds, inadequate testing capacities and over-strained quarantine centers. But the health crisis is turning political. For more on this, we turn to Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a political scientist at Hong Kong Baptist University.

With a slowly recovering economy, the recent spike in COVID-19 cases in India is affecting both the retail and service sectors.

A new subtype of the omicron coronavirus variant is spreading in Denmark, the UK, India, Sweden and many other countries. The exact impact of the genome mutations is still unclear.

The omicron variant of COVID-19, which was first detected in South Africa, has so far resulted in fewer deaths and hospitalizations than previous waves. Though some experts warn not to take the variant lightly, life has almost returned to normal in cities such as Cape Town, where restaurants and bars are open for the first time since the pandemic began.

Health officials are worried the sheer number of new infections will once again overwhelm the Himalayan country's fragile health care system.

Call it an Olympic-sized gamble. Ahead of Chinese New Year holiday travel and the Winter Games, authorities there are sticking to their zero-Covid policy. As Omicron tears through much of the rest of the world, can the coronavirus really be barred from the Beijing Olympics?

Coronavirus cases have hit global records. Some countries have tightened measures, while others are pushing to relax rules because of the omicron variant's perceived milder infections and high national vaccination rates.