A man who tested positive for Omicron variant says 15 of his friends who joined him at a New York anime convention also have COVID-19

• A man who tested positive for the Omicron coronavirus variant says 15 of his friends are also sick.

• The man and a group of 30 people attended an anime convention in New York City last month.

• It's unclear if his friends also have the Omicron variant, but health officials are investigating.

A Minnesota man who attended an anime convention in New York last month — and later tested positive for the Omicron coronavirus variant — has reportedly told health officials that 15 of his friends have also contracted COVID-19.

It's unclear whether any of those people also caught the Omicron variant, health officials told media outlets. The man was one of the first reported cases of the Omicron variant in the United States, prompting questions of whether the variant spread throughout the convention, which tens of thousands of people attended.

"It's hard to say that it is a super spreader. Certainly we're concerned about that," Kathy Como-Sabetti, manager of the COVID-19 epidemiology section for the Minnesota Department of Public Health, told The New York Times.

Officials in New York and Minnesota and with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are investigating the variant's possible spread and tracing the man's contacts, according to The Washington Post.

"We don't know if we'll see a lot of Omicron, or we'll see a lot of Delta," Kris Ehresmann, the director of the Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Prevention, and Control Division at the Minnesota Department of Health, told The Post. "But we're likely to see a lot of COVID."