Rwanda has confirmed 12 cases of new variants strain of Covid-19.
Dr. Daniel Ngamije, the Minister of Health, disclosed that all the cases were linked to international travel into the country.
Among the 12 cases, he pointed out, 2 patients were detected with the UK variant, while the rest were found with the highly contagious South African variant of the coronavirus.
"Right now, we have no local transmission. All the cases identified are from passengers who were traveling into the country. They were isolated after testing positive and this controlled the spread of the virus to any other person in the public,” Minister Ngamije said. He appeared on RBA, the public broadcaster on Sunday, March 21, 2021.
"To discover the new variants, we selected 400 positive cases from international travelers, citizens in the country, and others to see the sequence (evolution) of the virus in the country. This is where those cases were found, but they have all been treated as it stands.”
Since Rwanda reported the first Covid-19 case in March 2020, it is the first time new Covid-19 variants have been reported in the country.
While experts have expressed concerns over the efficacy of the vaccines on the new variants, Dr. Ngamije was reassuring saying that so far, the new variants have not affected the effectiveness of the vaccines in the country.
"Today, the available vaccines cannot be impacted by the variants. Other vaccines including Johnson & Johnson vaccine also have proven resistant to the variant. Therefore, people should not be worried. So far, there has been no recorded transmission of the new variants amongst any Rwandans.”
Monitoring the situation further
The Minister's disclosure of new variants came on the day Rwanda recorded 67 new cases of Covid-19, the lowest in over a week.
So far, 20828 total cases have been recorded in Rwanda and 290 people have lost their lives to the virus
"We are still monitoring the situation further, we have contact details of the people infected with the variants and this will go a long way to enable our contact tracing in the country,” Ngamije reiterated.
What we know is that the new strain has not spread to the public yet, he added.
The country has so far vaccinated 334,538 people as it intensifies efforts to protect the population.