XINHUA, HONG KONG :
Hong Kong’s Center for Health Protection (CHP) reported the fifth case of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 on Friday.
The 37-year-old male patient arrived in Hong Kong from the United States by flight CX881 on Dec. 7 and tested positive upon arrival at the Hong Kong International Airport.
The patient had received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and had been asymptomatic. The whole genome sequencing confirmed that the case carried the Omicron strain.
As the five cases involving Omicron were all detected at the Hong Kong International Airport restricted area or at a designated quarantine hotel, there has not been a spread in the community, said a spokesman for the CHP.
The CHP will adopt the most stringent prevention and control measures to prevent the mutant strain from entering the local community, the spokesman said.
Apart from the aforementioned case, two of the Omicron cases are related to South Africa, and two cases are related to Nigeria.
The CHP also reported four additional imported cases of COVID-19 on Friday, taking the total tally of confirmed cases in the financial hub to 12,482.
Three of the cases involved mutant strains while the mutation test result of the remaining case is pending. The patients comprise two males and two females aged from 15 to 57.
A total of 61 cases have been reported in the past 14 days and all were imported, according to the CHP.
Since the launch of the government inoculation program in late February, around 4.8 million people, or 71.2 percent of the eligible population, have taken at least one shot of the vaccine, while around 4.56 million, or 67.8 percent, are fully vaccinated.
Meanwhile, a total of 235,170 people have taken the booster shot in Hong Kong as of 7:00 p.m. local time Thursday.
The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government expects the third-dose vaccination to cover about 1.86 million people.
