Preliminary tests suggest that Omicron has already become the dominant variant of Covid-19 in Lithuania, according to the country's statistics office and the National Public Health Laboratory (NVSPL).
“Omicron has spread very rapidly in Lithuania and is already the dominant strain,” Statistics Lithuania posted on Facebook on Wednesday.
“Currently, the Omicron variant is suspected to be present in almost all the samples with a positive PCR result that are tested using the [...] qPCR method which provisionally detects the strain of the virus,” it said.
Based on the preliminary method, the prevalence of the new variant “was probably less than 10 percent during the Christmas period and is now likely to be above 90 percent”, according to the office.
The data have yet to be confirmed by sequencing tests which take at least two weeks or so, it noted.
Lukas Žemaitis of the NVSPL also said that Omicron has probably become the dominant variant.
“Given that Omicron doubles in a matter of days, it is likely that when we do the sequencing, these figures will prove to be correct,” he told BNS.
128 confirmed cases
A total of 128 cases of the Omicron variant have been confirmed in Lithuania so far, most of them unrelated to foreign travel, the National Public Health Center (NVSC) said on Wednesday.
Most of these cases have been detected in Vilnius County, with the rest spread across nearly all other counties.
The ages of the infected range from two to 77, with an average age of 31 years.
Some 90 percent if the infected said they had developed symptoms typical of Covid-19, but none of them have been hospitalised.
There are both vaccinated and unvaccinated people among the infected, according to the NVSC.
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