Five people in Alameda County have tested positive for the COVID-19 omicron variant, public health officials announced on Friday. All of them are vaccinated and experiencing mild symptoms.
Public health departments in Alameda County and the City of Berkeley said in a press release on Friday that the cases were among 12 traced back to a Nov. 27 wedding in Wisconsin. One of the five people who tested positive for the omicron variant attended the wedding after traveling internationally, officials said. The public health departments didn't specify where the person was prior to the wedding.
Genomic sequencing was not available for the other seven cases linked to the wedding as of Friday night. As a result, it's unclear which strain of COVID-19 infected the other seven people linked to the Wisconsin wedding.
The omicron variant was first discovered a week ago Friday in South Africa, but Dutch health officials determined this week the strain was present in the Netherlands as early as Nov. 19.
Two days prior to Alameda County's announcement, the first omicron case in the U.S. was detected in San Francisco. That person traveled back to the Bay Area on Nov. 22, testing positive for the variant on Monday.
The World Health Organization said on Friday that it's still unknown if the variant is more or less transmissible than the highly contagious delta variant, the spread of which prompted Alameda County, the City of Berkeley and seven other Bay Area jurisdictions to reinstitute a public indoor mask mandate this summer.
Berkeley and the eight counties agreed in October on criteria that would enable a public health department to lift the mandate. But Marin County, the first in the Bay Area last month to lift its mandate, said this week bringing it back was "on the table" depending on the omicron variant's spread.
Alameda County officials said all 12 of the adults whose COVID-19 cases were linked to the Wisconsin wedding, including one in Berkeley, were fully vaccinated. None of them were older than 49 years old, and most of them had received a booster shot.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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