By Alexander Onukwue,

New York City’s new mayor Eric Adams is going ahead with a planned visit to Ghana this week, despite global concerns about the severity of the omicron variant of covid-19 and the Africa-focused travel bans it has—according to some health professionals and world leaders—prematurely triggered.

Adams will begin his first term as mayor on Jan. 1. But before then, he wants to spend a week with his family in the West African country, to pray and reflect on history, and will return to the US on Dec. 8.

“I made a promise to myself that I would visit Ghana following the 400-year anniversary of slavery in America and the election, to show how far we have come and remembered how far we still must go,”  Adams said, per the New York Post. That anniversary was in 2019 when Ghana’s tourism-boosting ‘Year of Return’ invited people of African descent to visit and live in the country.