Rishard Khan

There have been eight Omi­cron cas­es de­tect­ed in the coun­try which do not have im­me­di­ate­ly ap­par­ent sources of in­fec­tion such as re­cent trav­el or con­tact with a COVID-19 pos­i­tive pa­tient.

This was re­vealed yes­ter­day by the Min­istry of Health’s Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor Dr Av­ery Hinds dur­ing the min­istry’s COVID-19 vir­tu­al up­date.

Hinds said in­ves­ti­ga­tions are on­go­ing, adding that some of the pa­tients may have come in con­tact with symp­to­matic cas­es.

“A cou­ple of them did have con­tact with oth­er in­di­vid­u­als who had flu-like symp­toms and the in­ves­ti­ga­tions is go­ing on to see whether or not there was a trav­el his­to­ry with those in­di­vid­u­als,” Hinds said.

He notes that the num­bers of such cas­es were now in­creas­ing.

“As we are con­tin­u­ing the epi­demi­o­log­i­cal in­ves­ti­ga­tions and the ob­ser­va­tions of what’s go­ing on in the pop­u­la­tion—we are see­ing where there are in­creas­ing pro­por­tions of these cas­es that don’t seem to be linked to im­por­ta­tion and are linked to what we call hid­den chains of trans­mis­sion,” he said.

How­ev­er, Dr Hinds said, it was not yet the right time to de­clare the vari­ant as be­ing in com­mu­ni­ty trans­mis­sion.

Com­mu­ni­ty trans­mis­sion is when an in­fec­tious dis­ease be­gins cir­cu­lat­ing with­in a group of peo­ple who have had no known con­tact with a per­son in­fect­ed with or ex­posed to the dis­ease.

“As we con­tin­ue to un­cov­er these chains, we will get a bet­ter idea of how well es­tab­lished these (chains of trans­mis­sion) are or if they are self-lim­it­ing,” he said.

How­ev­er, Hinds said the min­istry at­tempts to con­tain any such chains of trans­mis­sion when they are dis­cov­ered.

“We would try to ei­ther iso­late those who were in con­tact and al­so to quar­an­tine those who are not yet pos­i­tive but may have been ex­posed to lim­it the spread of those chains. So while we con­tin­ue to do that and we don’t see ev­i­dence of mul­ti­ple chains pop­ping up all over the pop­u­la­tion, then we don’t yet say we have es­tab­lished what’s known as com­mu­ni­ty trans­mis­sion,” he said.

He, how­ev­er, not­ed that the re­cent trends point to it be­ing an im­mi­nent threat giv­en Omi­cron’s track record in­ter­na­tion­al­ly.

“We’ve seen it hap­pen in oth­er pop­u­la­tions and we con­tin­ue to do our own ob­ser­va­tions. We’ll not be sur­prised to see it hap­pen but we are do­ing every­thing with­in our pub­lic health ca­pa­bil­i­ty to de­lay it as far as pos­si­ble by im­ple­ment­ing the pub­lic health mea­sures around the cas­es we do iden­ti­fy.”

The coun­try record­ed its first Omi­cron case on De­cem­ber 13, an im­port­ed case. Since then, 28 peo­ple have been de­tect­ed with the vari­ant of con­cern.