COVID-19: Japan reports first case of new variant from South Africa, air travel suspended

Japan on December 28 detected one case of the new coronavirus variant 501.V2 from South Africa, the government announced in a statement. Several cases of the new highly transmissible coronavirus variant spreading in the UK have been already found in the country in people who had recently arrived from the UK. According to sources of local broadcaster Japan Times, the case of the South Africa variant had been identified in a woman in her 30s who arrived in Japan on Dec. 19. Health officials said that the variant might be responsible for the sudden surge in the coronavirus outbreak across Japan. 

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga told a press conference that with the new year holidays ahead and the understaffed hospitals, the ministers had to remain alert. Further, he suspended new entries of the nonresident foreign nationals into Japan with immediate effect to curb the spread from the ‘dangerously transmissible’ coronavirus variant. He said that the new travel restrictions were aimed to protect Japan’s citizens’ lives and livelihoods, by taking measures in advance to forestall the spread of the new variant. 

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To raise 'level of urgency'

Japan’s PM urged the people to practice the hygiene and celebrate the New Year “quietly”. At a meeting of the government’s task force on the coronavirus response, Suga spoke about the South African variant, saying, that the virus recognizes no year-end or new year holidays. He asked the ministers to “raise the level of their sense of urgency” and thoroughly carry out countermeasures, Japan times reported. Earlier, the Japanese government put the UK variant cases into quarantine as the authorities were vigorously trying to trace the infected persons’ contacts and possible routes of infection.

Meanwhile, France’s also reported the first case of the more contagious UK’s coronavirus variant in French resident from the town of Tours, Centre-Val de Loire region in the western France.  The infected man had entered France on 19 December after a trip to London and was asymptomatic at the time of testing. The Frenchman was detected with the UK’s more contagious variant known as VOC 202012/01 at a hospital, post which, several positive samples of coronavirus were being sequenced for the VOC 202012/01 variant. 

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