While all of Europe has already announced the restriction of flights from southern Africa, now it is the turn of Japan and South Korea to follow suit. The two countries announced Saturday entry restrictions on travelers from southern Africa due to the Omicron variant of the new coronavirus, forcing them into stricter quarantines.

The Japanese government, through its Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, has announced that it will add Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia to the list of countries with stricter entry criteria, while South Korea will restrict the issuance of visas to travelers from South Africa - where the Omicron variant was first detected - and seven other neighboring countries.

Thus, all travelers arriving in Japan who have recently been to countries in the southern African region are now required to undergo a mandatory 10-day quarantine at a government center and must pass three PCR tests to detect the presence of the virus during this period.

The two Asian countries are thus seeking to replicate the containment measures that countries on several continents are developing to halt the spread of a variant that the World Health Organization (WHO) has already described as "worrisome" because of its high level of contamination.