The first South African doctor, Angelique Coetzee, to discover patients infected with the new COVID variant, Omicron, told The Telegraph that its symptoms are "unusual but mild."

Dr Coetzee said she was first alerted to the possibility of a new variant when patients in her busy private practice in the capital Pretoria started to come in earlier this month suffering from coronavirus symptoms that did not make immediate sense.

The patients were young people suffering from intense fatigue and a six-year-old child with a very high pulse rate, she said.

However, she noted that none of them suffered from a loss of taste or smell.

“Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before.”

Nov. 18, when four family members all tested positive for the virus with complete exhaustion, she informed the country’s vaccine advisory committee.

In total, she said around two dozen of her patients have tested positive for COVID-19 with symptoms of the new variant.

According to her, they were mostly healthy men who turned up “feeling so tired.”

She lastly indicated that about half of them did not receive the coronavirus vaccine.