The news came via a notice issued by the Phuket Provincial Public Health Office (PPHO) today (Dec 28).
The notice gave a breakdown of the cases as follows:
- Dec 15 - 4 cases detected
- Dec 16 - 1 case detected
- Dec 17 - 4 cases detected
- Dec 18 - 4 cases detected
- Dec 19 - 7 cases detected
- Dec 20 - 7 cases detected
- Dec 21 - 12 cases detected
- Dec 22 - 5 cases detected
- Dec 23 - 9 cases detected
- Dec 24 - 21 cases detected
The notice marked, “Almost all of them are tourists who have been diagnosed with the virus since ‘Day 0’ at Phuket International Airport.”
The notice did not explain how many were identified after Day 0 of the tourist’s stay in Phuket.
Phuket officials have yet to recognise any local transmissions of Omicron. PPHO Chief Dr Kusak Kukiattikoon held a press conference Monday last week (Dec 20) to specifically announce that so far there had been no community infections of Omicron in Phuket.
Phuket health issues have been silent on the issue since.
Dr Kusak told The Phuket News Thai-language sister-newspaper Khao Phuket earlier today, “For all 74 infected people, there is a high probability that they are infected with the Omicron variant, but we are still waiting on confirmation from the Department of Medical Sciences in Bangkok, which will take approximately seven days for the test results to be known.”
However, Dr Kusak, and the notice, gave no indication of whether any of the 74 have actually been confirmed as infected with Omicron ‒ despite test results of all arrivals who were “detected” on Dec 15-20 already taking more than seven days to be confirmed.
Also of note, the notice issued today made no account of the five cases already confirmed after infected arrivals landed on the island before Dec 15