Image caption, South Africa’s president has urged everyone to get vaccinated The new coronavirus variant Omicron has now become dominant in South Africa and is driving a sharp increase in new infections, health officials say. Some 11,500 new Covid infections were registered in the latest daily figures. That is a sharp rise on the 8,500 cases confirmed the previous day. By contrast, daily infections were averaging between 200 and 300 in mid-November, a top South African scientist told the BBC. Omicron has now been detected in at least 24 countries around the world, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Those who have already had other variants of coronavirus do not appear to be protected against Omicron but vaccines are still believed to protect against severe disease, according to top scientists from the global health body and South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD). “Previous infection used to […]