The Health Emergency Operations Center HEOC says it is working with the labs to identify potential cases of the UK COVID-19 variant after a person who had traveled to the UK recently and connected to an emerging COVID-19 cluster tested positive for the illness.
The HEOC had announced earlier that more than 30 guests who had attended a local wedding reception had tested positive for COVID-19 and updated last night that the total cases related to the reception have now reached 41.
In a separate update today, HEOC said that a local who had traveled from the UK recently had tested positive for COVID-19 and that the person is a family member of one of the families linked to the cluster.
HEOC highlighted that the person traveled from the UK after the wedding reception and that the person was not required to quarantine as authorities had not yet tightened the quarantine measures for those traveling from the UK.
HEOC noted that the person had developed symptoms and was tested soon after. It added that there was no way to determine whether this case is due to the new strain of the COVID-19 pandemic currently rampant in the UK.
But the HEOC said that it had been sending samples abroad for genotyping and that it would continue to do so.
HEOC said that in the meantime, it is working with labs to identify potential cases of the variant.
The Health Protection Agency HPA had mandated that all locals and work permit holders traveling from the UK would be required to stay under quarantine for 10 days.
HPA had said that these travelers would be quarantined at home and would be tested after 5 days of isolation as well as after 10 days of isolation.
This comes after several countries across the world took precautionary measures to combat the mutated variant of the COVID-19 virus that had been initially detected in the UK. The new variant is reported to spread faster, although its severity is yet to be determined.
