(Reuters) – Prepare dinner Islands, a small South Pacific nation that has not skilled COVID-19 in its neighborhood, is readying for its first coronavirus infections after an contaminated traveller visited, Prime minister Mark Brown stated on Sunday.
The traveller from New Zealand spent eight days in the neighborhood and examined optimistic for Omicron upon returning dwelling final week, Brown stated in a video posted on the federal government’s Fb web page.
“It’s doubtless that the individual … was infectious whereas right here and additional doubtless that the virus is in our neighborhood,” he stated.
“It could be there may be ‘silent transmission’, the place our excessive vaccination charge is so protecting that folks get COVID however so mildly that they don’t realise they’ve it.”
Official information present that 99.6% of the island nation’s roughly 17,000 individuals aged 12 and over is double-vaccinated, and 70% of these eligible have had their booster pictures.
Prepare dinner Islands resumed quarantine-free journey with New Zealand a month in the past, after shutting itself off from the world when the pandemic hit in early 2020.
In December, the nation reported one case of COVID-19 in an individual quarantining after arriving on a repatriation flight, who was not uncovered to the neighborhood.
“The truth that we’ve a excessive share of our individuals vaccinated will give us substantial safety from critical sickness,” Brown stated.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Enhancing by William Mallard)
Supply: KFGO
