The safe-haven yen hovered near a seven-week high on Thursday while the rand and riskier currencies languished as the Omicron coronavirus variant established itself as the dominant strain in South Africa and continued to spread globally.
Early indications suggesting Omicron may be markedly more contagious than previous variants have rattled financial markets on worries that a return to travel bans and lockdowns could choke off the nascent global recovery.
The strain has been found in places as widespread as Australia, Britain, Canada and Japan, even as those countries rapidly tighten their borders.
Against Japan’s currency, the US dollar edged 0.11 percent higher to 112.875 yen, but remained close to Tuesday’s low of 112.535, a level not seen since Oct. 11.
Against the South African rand, the greenback was off 0.12 percent at 16.0025, after a more than 1 percent surge overnight.
The number of new cases reported in South Africa – where Omicron was first discovered four weeks ago – doubled from Tuesday to Wednesday. The country’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases said 74 percent of all the virus genomes it had sequenced last month had been of the new variant.
The first case in the United States, reported on Wednesday, was a fully vaccinated person in California who returned from South Africa on Nov. 22 and tested positive seven days later. — Reuters
