Burning Question On the same Tuesday, the NICD team informed the department of health and other labs across South Africa doing sequencing, which later started coming up with similar results.
The same day, the NICD entered the data into the GISAID global science database, and found that Botswana and Hong Kong had also reported cases with the same gene sequence.
On Nov. 24, NICD officials and the department notified the World Health Organisation. By that stage, Viana said, more than two-thirds of positive tests in Gauteng, the South African province that includes Pretoria and Johannesburg, were showing the S-gene dropout - a sign that Omicron was already becoming dominant.