As many as 125 passengers or almost 80 per cent of those traveling from Italy to India on the non-scheduled charter flight (YU-661) tested positive for the coronavirus on arrival at Amritsar airport on Thursday.
The flight, operated by a Portuguese company, EuroAtlantic Airways, landed at Amritsar’s Sir Guru Ram Dass Ji International Airport around 1.30 pm on Thursday with 179 passengers.
This comes amid heightened testing at all airports across the country. India earlier identified several European countries, including Italy, “at risk” in the wake of the outbreak of Omicron.
Taking to Twitter, the Amritsar airport authorities stated that they have taken all necessary actions to stop the spread of Covid-19. “In today’s flight 125 passengers tested positive, and are being attended by State health officials. Rest 35 tested negative, and have been advised self-monitoring and would be under supervision,” the airport noted.
VK Seth, the airport director at Amritsar, said as many as 125 passengers tested positive out of the 179, who were flying in a chartered flight from Milan. Of them, 19 were either children or infants so they were exempt from on-arrival RT-PCR testing.
Officials said the passengers who have been tested Covid positive has been sent to institutional quarantine in their respective districts.
Chaotic visuals from the Amritsar airport showed a large number of passengers waiting to leave and in some videos, passengers were seen arguing with the authorities. After the test reports came in, a number of the passengers were not satisfied with the results and created a hue and cry at the terminal building. The passengers who tested positive for Covid-19 were reluctant for admission in the isolation ward of any of the city hospitals and were pressing upon the authorities to let them go.
Officials from the health department tried to convince them to get admission in the isolation ward in any of the hospitals they desired in Amritsar.
Earlier, Air India has rubbished reports stating passengers on board its flight to Rome tested positive for coronavirus on arrival at the Amritsar International Airport.
The airline clarified that it didn’t operate any flights from Rome as of now. “Several media houses have reported that passengers of Air India flight from Rome to Amritsar have been tested Covid positive. This is wrong and baseless. Air India doesn’t operate any flight from Rome currently,” Air India tweeted.