NEW DELHI, Jan 6: As many as 125 passengers on a chartered flight from Milan in Italy have tested positive on their arrival at the Amritsar airport.
Punjab, which is already in the list of 10 states of concern for the central government due to steep rise in Covid cases, reported the cluster of new infections from the international flight who would now have to send to an institutional quarantine.
There were 179 passengers on the Milan – Amritsar chartered flight YU-661 that arrived in Amritsar around 1.30 pm. The flight made a technical halt at Tbilisi (Georgia), according to officials. It was reportedly operated by EuroAtlantic Airways, a Portuguese company.
As the passengers included 19 children who were exempted from tests, all the remaining adult passengers were tested on arrival as Italy is one of the high risk countries for Omicron, and 125 of them were found to be positive.
Chaotic visuals from the Amritsar airport showed a large number of passengers waiting to leave and policemen trying to control the crowd. Many of the passengers questioned why they tested positive after Covid negative results in Italy. They claimed that before boarding the flight, all of them had undergone testing in Italy and were allowed to board only after testing negative.
On Wednesday, Punjab reported 1,811 new Covid-19 cases along with four fatalities. The total number of cases in the state went up to 6,08,723. The death toll in the state stood at 16,657, while the total number of active cases stood at 4,434.
The state has also been hit in the vaccination drive for the teens due to the strike by 16,000 odd paramedics demanding pay hike and allowances. The staff on strike include 9,500 employees under National Health Mission (NHM), 2,500 multipurpose health workers (MPHW), 3,000 staff nurses on regular rolls and 1,200 rural pharmacists. The NHM staff include clerical cadres, auxiliary nursing midwives (ANMs), staff nurses, health workers and so on.
(Manas Dasgupta)
