About 15 people who attended an anime convention in New York last month with a Minnesota man who later was found to have the Omicron …
About 15 people who attended an anime convention in New York last month with a Minnesota man who later was found to have the Omicron variant have also tested positive for the coronavirus, the man has told health officials in his state. It is uncertain whether any of those cases involved the Omicron variant. The man said that his friends — a group of about 30 people — had come from all over the country for the event, which ran Nov.19-21. About half of them also later tested positive for the virus, he told the officials. The man, officials said, was fully vaccinated and had gotten a booster just weeks before the convention. He has recovered from mild symptoms that began shortly after the convention ended, and has provided names and contact information of several in his group to health officials. Since the friends live in other states, their names were forwarded to those states’ health departments. Details of their cases are not known. The Minnesota man’s case was among the first reports of Omicron in the United States, and it presented a worrisome possibility for health officials: Might the anime convention, which drew tens of thousands of people to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for three days, have been a vector for spreading the new variant, which scientists fear may be able to spread more quickly than any other variant? After learning that the man had attended a large convention in New York, Kathy Como-Sabetti, manager of the Covid epidemiology section for the Minnesota Department of Public Health, said: “I kind of went, ‘Wow, well, this changes our story.
