Chief Medical Officer says four known cases of UK COVID-19 variant in Australia

CMO Paul Kelly says of the almost 2,500 cases of coronavirus that have been diagnosed in hotel quarantine since March, four of them are the UK's variant strain of COVID-19. 

“Because of the huge number of cases that are in the UK, they're certainly nowhere near analysing every case of the virus.

“Just to give you some idea of that … there's been around about 1.5 million cases reported in the UK.

“Of those, about 69,000 have had genomic analysis. 69,000 out of 1.5 million. And of those 69,000, 3,000 are of this new strain. They're mostly in a certain part of the country, in south-east England, London and surrounding areas.

"So, there are some issues there that come to mind, that it's not every genomic analysis, so how widespread this virus is, is still not clear.

"Even if someone from the UK came with that virus, and there have only been four so far, it would be controlled in the Australian context."