The number of COVID-19 cases in South Africa, where scientists first alerted the world to the now-raging Omicron variant last month, appears to have peaked, the country’s top infectious disease expert said Wednesday.

Salim Abdool Karim, who is heading up South Africa’s pandemic response, told the Washington Post the nation of 59 million has seemingly passed its peak of new Omicron cases and expects to see the “same trajectory” play out in almost every other country across the globe.

“If previous variants caused waves shaped like Kilimanjaro, Omicron’s is more like we were scaling the north face of Everest,” Karim told the newspaper in reference to South Africa’s sharp rise in cases during the first weeks of December.

“Now we’re going down, right back down, the south face,” Karim continued. “And that is the way we think it may work with a variant like Omicron, and perhaps even more broadly what we’ll see with subsequent variants at this stage of the pandemic.”

The sharp peak in cases and the variant’s lower risk of severe illness or death may be attributed to more than 70 percent of South Africans having been infected by earlier strains, likely leading to a stronger antibody response, Karim said.