Australia on alert as Queensland sees first case of South African mutant COVID in hotel quarantine

A highly infectious variant of COVID-19 has reached Australia and is spreading rapidly around the world.

The first Australian case of the South African variant is a woman who arrived in Queensland on December 22 and went straight into hotel quarantine.

“Genome sequencing has come back to show that she has this new variant that has been picked up in South Africa that is thought to be more contagious,” the state’s Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said.

The woman was on Tuesday…