Russia on Monday reported its first two cases of omicron coronavirus variant.

The cases were detected from the two people who arrived in Russia from South Africa last week, the country's sanitary watchdog Rospotrebnadzor said.

Ten more people with positive COVID-19 tests are waiting in an observation center for discovering their variant of the illness, said Rospotrebnadzor's statement, without specifying the nationality of the infected people.

The World Health Organization on Nov. 26 declared the new strain “a variant of concern,” and named it omicron.

The WHO warned that the novel variant has a large number of mutations, some of which provoke concern as they may affect the effectiveness of vaccines.

South African scientists on Nov. 24 announced that they had discovered the variant, which has several mutations. Cases of the variant have since been found in a number of countries worldwide./agencies