SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant
a variant of SARS-CoV-2
Omicron (B.1.1.529) is a heavily mutated variant of SARS-CoV-2 first reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) by the Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa on 24 November 2021. It was first detected in Botswana and has spread to become the predominant variant in circulation around the world. Following the original B.1.1.529 variant, several subvariants of Omicron have emerged, including: BA.1, BA.2, BA.3, BA.4, and BA.5. Two subvariants of BA.5 emerged by October 2022, called BQ.1 and BQ.1.1.
In mid-2023, the extremely-mutated BA.2.86 variant emerged. Its main descendent, JN.1 (BA.2.86.1.1), emerged soon afterward and swept the globe that winter, becoming dominant within a few months. Since then, all circulating lineages have descended from JN.1. JN.1 went on to spawn multiple notable sublineages, including KP.3.1.1 and XEC in 2024, and LP.8.1, NB.1.8.1, and XFG in 2025. XFG became the dominant variant globally over the summer of 2025.
Three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine provide protection against severe disease and hospitalization caused by Omicron and its subvariants.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q109739412. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.