Coronavirus: tests link Hong Kong airport worker’s infection to four previously imported cases from Russia
- Health officials say worker, 50, could have caught virus from undiagnosed aircrew
- Patient also revealed to be carrying the more infectious Delta variant
They said the worker, 50, could have caught the virus from undiagnosed aircrew. The man, whose infection was confirmed on Sunday, was also revealed to be carrying the more infectious Delta variant, which the World Health Organization expects to become the dominant Covid-19 strain globally.
The city confirmed one imported Covid-19 case on Tuesday, an arrival from Cambodia. That brought the city’s tally of confirmed infections to 11,952, with 212 related deaths. Fewer than five people tested preliminary-positive.
Tests done by the Department of Health’s public health laboratory revealed that the viral genetic sequence of the porter’s sample was different from that of a 27-year-old airport worker who was confirmed infected on June 24.
But the porter’s sequence was found to be related to genomes of four imported cases from Russia. Those cases involved an aircrew member of cargo flight RL9933, which arrived from Moscow on July 6 and the porter had worked on, another cargo flight crew member who landed in Hong Kong on June 19, and a couple who came to the city on June 29.
A separate analysis led by Polytechnic University Associate Professor Gilman Siu Kit-hang found that the airport worker’s virus genome, although related to the ones of the Russian arrivals, was still six mutations apart from one of them. That meant the porter likely contracted the variant from a different source, which could be another infected traveller or contaminated surface on cargo goods from the country.