The Cook Islands reported its first case of COVID-19 since the outbreak began on Saturday, as the South Pacific nation prepares to reopen its borders to tourists. 

With 96% of the eligible population double-dosed, the nation of around 17,000 people has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. 

According to Prime Minister Mark Brown, the virus was discovered in a 10-year-old boy quarantining after having arrived on a repatriation flight with his family on Thursday. The boy was thought to have arrived by plane from New Zealand.

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“We have been preparing ourselves for the time we reopen our borders. Our testing regimes have shown the value of that preparation by catching this case at the border,” Brown said, as per New York Times report.

The island nation, which cut itself off from the rest of the world when the pandemic struck, has announced that quarantine-free travel with New Zealand will resume on January 14. An outbreak of the virus in Auckland halted a short-lived travel bubble with New Zealand earlier this year.

Earlier in November, for the first time in two years, the remote Pacific nation of Tonga, after avoiding the global pandemic that has infected hundreds of millions of people and left millions dead, recorded its first coronavirus case.

According to the Ministry of Health in New Zealand, the infected person arrived in Tonga on a commercial flight that left Christchurch on Wednesday. In the last two days, four community cases have been reported in Christchurch. 

The person had been fully vaccinated and tested negative for the virus prior to travel, according to the ministry. Tonga’s geographical isolation — its main island is 1,100 miles northeast of New Zealand — had allowed it to remain immune to the virus until now, even as neighbouring Fiji battled one of the world’s fastest-growing coronavirus outbreaks.