France
France suspends flights from 7 southern African nations amid fears of new COVID variant
Paris/UNI/Xinhua: The French government announced on Friday to immediately suspend flights coming from the southern parts of Africa following the detection of a new Covid-19 variant in South Africa.
In a statement published Friday by the prime minister's office, travellers from South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia and Eswatini, will not be able to enter French territory, regardless of their vaccination status.
"People who have traveled during the last 14 days in one of these countries are invited to report to the authorities and to carry out a (real time) RT-PCR screening test as soon as possible," it added.
Also, the French government advised people who plan to visit these countries to postpone their trips.
"As we do not want to have to diagnose this variant on national and European territory, even if we do not know more about its dangerousness, the decision was taken to immediately suspend all flights from southern Africa for at least 48 hours," French Health Minister Olivier Veran said, cited by BFMTV.
According to him, the new variant B.1.1.529 has not yet been detected in Europe.
Support Our Journalism
We cannot do without you.. your contribution supports unbiased journalism
IBNS is not driven by any ism- not wokeism, not racism, not skewed secularism, not hyper right-wing or left liberal ideals, nor by any hardline religious beliefs or hyper nationalism. We want to serve you good old objective news, as they are. We do not judge or preach. We let people decide for themselves. We only try to present factual and well-sourced news.
Support objective journalism for a small contribution.
