The Cook Islands, a small country of 17,000 inhabitants in the Pacific Ocean, recorded its first death from Covid-19 on Saturday since the start of the pandemic.
“It is with great sadness that I announce that we have just recorded our first death in the country attributed to Covid-19,” Prime Minister Mark Brown said in a statement on Saturday evening.
The victim, a 63-year-old woman, "had received her three doses of anti-Covid vaccine, but she also suffered from several pathologies," he said.
First case in December 2021
The Cook Islands completely isolated themselves from the rest of the world at the start of the pandemic, and only recorded their first case of coronavirus last December.
But since then, regular connections with neighboring New Zealand have resumed, the highly contagious Omicron variant has arrived, and 4,727 cases have been identified in the archipelago so far, according to the Ministry of Health.
“It is tragic that we lost someone to Covid, but it was not unexpected,” commented the Prime Minister.
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