The Ministry of Health has detected the first case of the omicron variant of the coronavirus in the Valencian Community. This first case is a patient with a mild illness that has been sequenced in the Elche hospital.
The probable origin of the contagion is a meal in Valencia and the patient would not have travelled to any country at risk.
This contagion is the 39th confirmed throughout Spain by sequencing after cases have appeared in several communities. Madrid detected the first omicron contagion in Spain on November 29. Later, more arrived in Catalonia, Galicia and Extremadura, so it was a matter of time before the Valencian genomic sequencing teams found someone infected with omicron.
If confirmed how the contagion of this patient was transmitted, it would be a case of community transmission, which indicates that this new variant of the virus would already be circulating freely in the Valencian Community although it would not have been detected until now since the infected person would not have travelled to any of the countries where this variant of the virus is known to be predominant.
According to the latest report from the Ministry of Health on the variants of SARS-CoV-2 in Spain, most of the 36 confirmed (19) would be from people without links to travel to countries considered high risk, which would confirm that omicron already it is circulating freely. In addition, other countries have confirmed two cases in travellers from Spain, which reinforces this theory. The other 17 cases detected so far were travellers from South Africa (the country that sounded the alarm about the appearance of this new variant) or their close contacts.