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JEDDAH: Saudi Arabia confirmed its first case of the Omicron COVID-19 variant coming from a north African country, state news agency reported on Wednesday.
The agency quoting a statement from the kingdom’s health ministry said authorities had isolated the person and people who were in contact with them. It is the first Omicron variant case reported in the Middle East and North Africa.
The Saudi ministry said the person was a Saudi national who had travelled from a North African country, without giving further details. The ministry urged people to complete their vaccination and ordered travellers to respect self-isolation and testing rules.
The strain, which was first announced by South Africa but has since been discovered to have been present earlier in Europe, has prompted governments around the globe to reimpose travel restrictions, despite warnings from the World Health Organization this could do more harm than good.
“One case of the Omicron variant has been detected in the kingdom — it was a citizen coming from a North African country,” the ministry official told the state news agency. “He has been put in isolation, as have his contacts, and the necessary health measures have been taken.”
Saudi Arabia last week halted flights from seven southern African countries, mirroring similar moves by other government, but travel links with North Africa have remained unaffected.
Since the pandemic started, Saudi Arabia has recorded 549,000 cases of Covid-19, 8,836 of them fatal. More than 47 million doses of Covid vaccine have been administered in the kingdom, which has a population of nearly 35 million.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that the heavily mutated Omicron coronavirus variant was likely to spread internationally and poses a very high risk of infection surges that could have “severe consequences” in some places.
Omicron was first reported on November 24 in southern Africa, where infections have risen steeply. It has since spread to more than a dozen countries, many of which have imposed travel restrictions to try to seal themselves off.
