Tonga’s total COVID-19 cases reached at least 139 on Monday, with the youngest case involving a 5-month-old infant, local media reported, following the emergence of the highly transmissible Omicron variant in the tsunami-hit nation.
Of those cases, 133 were from Tongatapu and six from Vava’u villages.
The oldest case is a 63-year-old patient, Piukala said, adding that all infected children aged 12 and above have been immunized. He said that 1,344 residents in Tonga are still unvaccinated.
While scientific evidence suggests that Omicron has less severity than the likes of Delta, Piukala emphasized that the variant could spread rapidly in Tonga, which previously reported only one case of infection since the pandemic began.
“A person sick with the Delta variant can spread it to another one to three people, while a person sick with the Omicron variant can spread it to up to seven or eight people,” he told reporters.
The World Bank on Monday estimated the eruption, tsunami, and ash fall had caused $90.4 million in damages, which is equivalent to 18.5 percent of Tonga’s gross domestic product.
NASA said the undersea volcano eruption was “hundreds of times” stronger than the Hiroshima nuclear explosion.
Jim Garvin, a chief scientist at NASA, and his colleagues have been monitoring changes in Tonga since a new land rose above the water surface in 2015 and joined two existing lands. They used a combination of satellite observations and surface-based geophysical surveys to track the changes in the Pacific Island nation.
“This is a preliminary estimate, but we think the amount of energy released by the eruption was equivalent to somewhere between 4 to 18 megatons of TNT,” Garvin said.
“That number is based on how much was removed, how resistant the rock was, and how high the eruption cloud was blown into the atmosphere at a range of velocities.”
