New Delhi, Dec 30: India on Wednesday extended the ban on flights to and from Britain till January 7 to contain the spread of the mutant strain of coronavirus prevalent there.
“Decision has been taken to extend the temporary suspension of flights to & from the UK till 7 January 2021,” Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said.
He said after January 7, flights would resume in a “strictly regulated” manner and details about it would be announced “shortly”.
The announcement to extend the ban came on a day when the Health Ministry said it had detected a total of 20 cases of the new strain of SARS-CoV-2 in the country after testing passengers who had returned from Britain between November 25 and December 22.
India had suspended all flights from Britain from December 23 to December 31.
Earlier, Puri said the government was also closely monitoring the situation in South Africa and a few other countries that have reported the new strain of SARS-CoV-2.
The minister had said India had put in place a new protocol for handling passengers from Britain and other countries, including genome sequencing of positive cases to detect the new strain.
“We are getting a handle on it. ... Our systems are in place, we have managed contact tracing,” Puri had told a press conference on Tuesday.
The minister said resumption of normal international passenger flights depended on the behaviour of the virus and the roll-out of the vaccine for Covid-19.
He said he expected normal international flights to be back to pre-Covid times in the first half of the new year.
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