receive a booster. california governor gavin newsom says the patient is experiencing mild symptoms and is doing well. joining me now from the west coast, jacob ward, nbc news correspondent and live from washington, mike memoli. thank you for being with me. you spoke to one of the top doctors at uc san francisco. what did you learn? dr. charles hsu who runs the lab that detected this particular variant spoke to the extraordinary infrastructure that has gone into places at the beginning of this pandemic, one that allowed a patient who returned from south off ka to san francisco november 22nd, felt poorly, turned in a test sample, that test was identified as an omicron variant, within about five hours, thanks to the gene sequencing capabilities here at the university of california at san francisco.
local health authorities and said, i have been in south africa, i know there s the omicron variant there. that s how their sample ended up here where they could do the gene sequencing and in less than five hours had the answer, they knew it was the omicron variant. all that person s close contacts including the passengers on the plane have been tested and tested negative, another good sign here. i spoke to dr. charles chu who runs the lab who did the gene sequencing here, has been working on zoonotic diseases for decades. he spoke about what happens next, now that they have the sample in their lab. what the identification of omicron has done for us, now that we have access to the sample, we re able to culture the virus, we re able to grow the virus in culture. by doing so, this is the first step for answering some of the critical questions that everyone has about omicron. is it more transmissible, what is the transmissibility relative to delta, is it perhaps more virulent or more sev