US announces second case of Covid-19 Omicron variant

The patient had no international travel history but had recently returned from a convention in New York, officials said

Health authorities in the midwestern US state of Minnesota announced Thursday they had detected another case of the Covid-19 Omicron variant on American soil, this time in a man with no known recent international travel history.

Like the first identified US case in California, the patient was vaccinated and had mild symptoms from which he has now recovered. He returned to the Minneapolis area from an anime convention in New York City, held November 19-21, before developing symptoms on November 22 and getting tested two days later.

"This news is concerning, but it is not a surprise," Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said in a statement, hailing his state's genomic sequencing and virus testing efforts.

The fact that the man had not recently returned from another country signals that the variant is circulating inside the United States, which epidemiologists had expected, despite Washington's decision to ban entry to travellers from several southern African nations.

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The case was made public a day after the Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) announced the first confirmed US case, a fully vaccinated traveller who had recently returned from South Africa and was recovering from mild symptoms.

US health authorities are urging everyone above the age of five to get vaccinated, and to get boosted when eligible.

Scientists hope lab testing will soon reveal the extent to which Omicron evades the protective action of vaccines, but expect they will remain at least partially effective, especially against severe disease.

Top US government scientist Anthony Fauci said Wednesday that past experience had shown boosters were a good idea because they raise the number of overall antibodies in a person's immune system, some of which will remain effective at stopping new variants.

"Our experience with variants such as the Delta variant, is that even though the vaccine isn't specifically targeted to the Delta variant, when you get a high enough level of an immune response, you get spillover protection," he said.

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