Australia on Friday reported a student who had no history of foreign travel had tested positive for covid-19 ommicron version, the country’s first detected case of community transmission.
The case, detected in the country’s largest city, Sydney, comes despite a ban on entry for non-citizens into the country and a ban on flights from southern Africa, where the type was first detected.
New South Wales Health said “the case has no known foreign travel history or links to people with foreign travel history” but stressed that further investigations and contact tracing were underway.
Australia has detected nine other Omicron cases, but all were found in arriving passengers.
The latest case raises the possibility that Omicron may already be spreading more widely in the community.
Student Regent’s Park Christian School, west of Sydney, has been closed and the family has been placed in quarantine.
Australia currently records around 2,000 Covid cases a day.
Apart from vaccination, the spread of the virus has been limited by a two-year border closure, lockdown, aggressive testing and tracing as well as local travel restrictions.
With officials expressing confidence that 87 per cent of people over the age of 16 have been vaccinated, the country is well prepared to deal with the new variant.
The hospitalization rate is currently low, and the death toll from the pandemic stands at 2,021.
The severity of Omicron is not yet known and it is also unclear whether it could make existing vaccines less effective.
But there are concerns that the variant may be more permeable than the dominant delta strain.
This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.
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