Australia has banned flights from India, and other countries are extending bans further afield, because an alarming number of passengers have started turning up at destination airports infected with Covid-19.
Experts are trying to work out how dozens of passengers can arrive and test positive to the disease, when they are meant to be have been tested and to have produced a negative result within 72 hours of boarding the plane.
At least 52 passengers returned positive tests after flight UK6395 from Delhi, operated by Indian airline Vistara, landed in Hong Kong on 4 April. Hong Kong applies the same 72-hour test before boarding as does Australia.
Australia has now acted to suspend all direct passenger flights from India until 15 May. New Zealand took similar measures two weeks earlier.
Hong Kong has banned all flights from India as well as from Pakistan and the Philippines. Major transit hubs like Dubai, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur have banned flights from India, though it remains possible to fly from India to Australia via Doha on Qatar Airways, with the right documentation. Canada suspended all commercial and private passenger flights from India and Pakistan for 30 days from 22 April.
Hong Kong applies border quarantine, as do Australia and New Zealand. If it wasn’t for that, the infected passengers from flight UK6395 would now be in the Hong Kong community, potentially spreading a highly contagious and potentially fatal disease.
Coronavirus is raging out of control in India, with people dying in the streets and in queues outside hospitals. Pakistan also appears to have lost control of the situation.
In some Indian cities, commercial oxygen supplies have run out, hospitals and crematoriums are overrun. India’s new coronavirus cases have topped 300,000 for the past six days. India reported 2771 new deaths on Tuesday but health experts suspect the tally is far higher.
India has seen large religious festivals apparently disregard Covid precautions. Another such festival, the annual Amarnath pilgrimage, is set to attract 600,000 Hindu pilgrims to Kashmir in July and August.
Over 9000 Australians in India are registered as wanting to return home to Australia and 650 of them are listed as vulnerable, according to the ABC.
In Australia and New Zealand, Covid-19 cases are now found only in passengers in hotel quarantine – sometimes spreading to the hotel workers looking after them, or to other “guests” in the hotels. In Australia, the total number of Covid cases in hotel quarantine has ballooned out from 90 (which is within the expected range) to 143.
NSW currently has 108 Covid cases in quarantine, 104 of which were acquired overseas, with India reported to be the single biggest country source of these.
Some countries, such as Germany, Italy and the UK, which have also banned travel from India, at least allow their own citizens to return home. Australia does not do that, and some people have found themselves trapped, with even repatriation flights cancelled.
It’s tragic for some and terms like “discriminatory” have been used – though it’s worth remembering that in cases of plague or pandemic, governments of all countries must put their home populations first.
Fast-spreading mutant Covid-19 variants are a clear and present danger. Vaccines have not yet been rolled out fully in Australia and New Zealand – and even for those who are vaccinated, the process is lengthy and gaining immunity takes a while.
Get an AstraZeneca jab in Australia tomorrow and you will then have to wait three months for your second ‘booster’ shot. Full immunity (or as full as you are going to achieve) comes about seven to 14 days after that second shot. So it takes 14 weeks, or three and a half months, all up, from your first jab.
At Australia’s current pace of roughly 311,000 doses a week, the target number of 40 million doses (needed to fully vaccinate Australia’s adult population) will not be achieved until late August 2023.
In the meantime, any government that let its guard down and allowed Covid-19 to sneak out of hotel quarantine facilities, to spread and take hold in the general community, would be punished mercilessly – by history, and at the next election.
Written by Peter Needham
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