JERUSALEM -- Israel detected 22 new cases of the Omicron COVID-19 variant, increasing the total number of Omicron cases in the country to 89, the Israeli Ministry of Health said Tuesday.
The ministry said that 57 of the 89 infected people are passengers returning from South Africa, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, Italy, Namibia, Tanzania, Germany, and Turkey.
Another 21 people who tested positive for the variant were infected in Israel as result of close contact with passengers arriving from overseas.
The remaining cases were infected in Israel without traveling overseas or having close contact with a returning traveler, according to the ministry.
It said 21 of the 89 people affected by Omicron were either unvaccinated or had recovered more than a year ago.
The ministry also reported another 150 cases with high suspicion of infection with the variant, but the results of their genomic sequencing tests have yet to be obtained.