BUZZ

South African scientists are working “at lightning speed” to ascertain how quickly a worrisome new coronavirus variant can spread and whether it is resistant to vaccines. Results will still take at least two weeks, said Tulio de Oliveira, a bio-informatics professor who runs gene-sequencing institutions and advises the government on the pandemic. Institutions are breeding the virus and experimenting on it, he said, not just in South Africa but around the world. “I am very, very worried,” he said of the variant, which has more mutations than earlier incarnations and has already been detected in Botswana and Hong Kong.