Yes. Mostly its a question of how much you look for them. Countries and regions that do a lot of routine sequencing and analysis to look for variants will find them. The US doesn’t do that, so we don’t detect variants until someone else sees it and we start looking.
And honestly variants are not really something that most people need to worry about. It is helpful for public health officials to keep track of vaccine efficacy and so forth, but not really meaningful to individuals. It’s often used as an excuse for why covid numbers are on the rise. As if it can’t be “there are too many unvaccinated people, most vaccinated people got their vaccinations > 6 months ago, and too many people stopped taking precautions” Nope, it can’t be that at all, must be this omicron thing that nobody could have predicted. /s
