Last year, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the Coronavirus pandemic a public health emergency, more than 70 countries were quick to impose travel restrictions against China, prompting an investigation into the hypothesis that the Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 virus had emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). While the fractious debate on the origin of COVID-19 has been put on the backburner, the focus is now on the origin of Omicron, the latest variant of the COVID-causing SARS COV-2 virus, which seems all set to replace Delta as the dominant global strain. While Tulio de Oliveira, the director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation at Stellenbosch University, in South Africa, and his team were the first to alert the WHO and other authorities to the new variant on November 24, recent news that the variant may have existed in the Netherlands a week prior, begs the question whether the travel bans imposed swiftly against the country are an appropriate response to the heavily-mutated variant. 

The EU, US, Canada, UK, Russia, Japan and India were some of the first to announce the travel ban which South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called discriminatory. He said the country instead of being hailed for strong genetic sequencing networks was in fact, being punished for alerting global health authorities.