Japan Finds Another Case of Community Spread of Omicron in Kyoto

(Bloomberg) -- Japan found another case of community spread of the coronavirus omicron variant in Kyoto prefecture, a day after neighboring Osaka prefecture confirmed first such spread in the nation.

A woman in her 20s who had no record of overseas travel was found to have the variant, Kyoto Governor Takatoshi Nishiwaki said at a briefing Thursday in remarks streamed by broadcaster NHK. The government of Osaka Wednesday said it found three cases of omicron that it wasn’t able to trace.

With its borders effectively closed off to new foreign visitors, most of the nation’s cases have come from travelers and have been discovered through airport testing, with total cases of the variant surpassing 100 for the first time Wednesday, according to local media. Shigeru Omi, the government’s top coronavirus adviser, said in a news briefing Thursday that the localized spread of the highly-contagious strain was likely happening already in different parts of the nation, although he dismissed the possibility of a vast outbreak across the country.

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