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Monkgomotsi Maseng was one of a team in Botswana that discovered the now dominant omicron variant of covid-19. She tells Keletso Thobega about being a medical scientist in Africa and returning to Botswana’s improving healthcare system
It was a day like any other albeit at the height of a global pandemic. Monkgomotsi Maseng and her colleagues were processing covid-19 samples from various patients and observing the results.
“All positive samples were sent for sequencing,” she remembers of that day in November 2021. “By the end of the day, about four sequences with a strange pattern were observed.”
Maseng was part of a team led by the Botswanan scientist Sikhulile Moyo that helped establish SARS-CoV-2 testing in the southern African country. Moyo and the team had worked over the weekend to run quality checks, cross referencing the results against the other known variants. After coming up with the same patterns they were convinced that this was a new variant: omicron.
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