[File Photo]

The Health Ministry will increase its level of COVID-19 testing as advanced testing equipment will soon be brought into Fiji’s Centre for Disease Control.

Health Ministry Permanent Secretary Doctor James Fong says the number of COVID cases will increase as the team will be conducting genomic sequencing.

The ministry had sent a set of positive samples to its reference laboratory in Melbourne for genomic sequencing, and the results confirmed that the BA.5 strain of Omicron is now circulating in the community.

“At the moment, we just need to be smart with the COVID safe measures- it doesn’t mean they need to know when to put on a mask or when they can leave off the mask, they need to know what areas can be dangerous areas that is crowded areas with poor ventilation and they should not enter those kind of spaces.”

The Health Ministry says the genomic test is not done on every positive case and that this is because countries will work on a sample to understand the epidemiological profile.

Dr Fong also stated that the ministry does not have an exact number nor can they identify specific cases because the team only tested a sample of positive cases for the BA.5 variant.