A COVID-19 outbreak that forced Fiji's capital into lockdown after the island nation avoided transmission for a year was confirmed as the Indian variant on Tuesday, with health officials saying they feared a "tsunami" of cases.
The Pacific country had largely dodged community transmission before a cluster emerged this month centred on a quarantine facility in Nadi, the city that is home to Fiji's international airport.
The permanent secretary for health and medical services, James Fong, said six new cases had emerged in quarantine facilities on Tuesday and events in India showed the threat posed by the strain could not be underestimated.
"We cannot let that nightmare happen in Fiji," he said in a televised address.
"We still have time to stop it happening but a single misstep will bring about the same COVID tsunami that our friends in India, Brazil, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States are enduring."
Security officers checking cars along a road in Suva after the Fijian capital entered a 14-day lockdown on 26 April, 2021. Source: Getty
Fiji has largely contained the virus through strict isolation measures and border controls, recording 109 cases and just two deaths in a population of 930,000.
There are currently 42 active cases, 18 of them detected at the border and 24 locally transmitted.
The cluster began when a soldier contracted the virus at a quarantine facility and transmitted it to his wife, who then exposed up to 500 people at a funeral.
Mr Fong said there was evidence that soldiers who had returned from overseas deployments had broken quarantine rules by mixing with each other when they should have been in isolation.
"This is unacceptable," he said, adding that the military was investigating what had happened.
The capital Suva is in lockdown, along with Nadi and Lautoka, Fiji's second-largest city.
People wearing face masks are seen at a supermarket amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Suva, Fiji, 23 April, 2021. Source: Getty
Authorities on Tuesday banned inter-island travel, while national carrier Fiji Airways has suspended all international and domestic passenger flights.
The emergence of community transmission is a blow for Fiji's hopes of opening quarantine-free travel bubbles with Australia and New Zealand, both major sources of international tourists before the pandemic.
'Variant of interest'
The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that a variant of COVID-19 feared to be contributing to a surge in coronavirus cases in India has been found in over a dozen countries.
The UN health agency said the B.1.617 variant of COVID-19 first found in India had as of Tuesday been detected in over 1,200 sequences uploaded to the GISAID open-access database "from at least 17 countries".
"Most sequences were uploaded from India, the United Kingdom, USA and Singapore," the WHO said in its weekly epidemiological update on the pandemic.
The WHO recently listed B.1.617 - which counts several sub-lineages with slightly different mutations and characteristics - as a "variant of interest".
But so far it has stopped short of declaring it a "variant of concern".
That label would indicate that it is more dangerous that the original version of the virus by for instance being more transmissible, deadly or able to dodge vaccine protections.
India is facing surging new cases and deaths in the pandemic, and fears are rising that the variant could be contributing to the unfolding catastrophe.
The explosion in infections in India - 350,000 new cases were recorded there on Tuesday alone - has driven a surge in global cases to 147.7 million.
The virus has now killed more than 3.1 million people worldwide.
