Changes in the rules of COVID-19, from today passengers coming to India from these countries will get a big relief

The Central government has lifted the Covid-19 test mandate for travellers arriving from/via China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Thailand and Japan. The government has also dropped the mandate to upload the ‘Air Suvidha’ form for such travellers.

The changes will come into effect from Monday (February 13, 2023).

The decision comes in the wake of a significant decline in Covid-19 cases in these countries, over the past few weeks.null

Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan, in a letter to his counterpart in the Ministry of Civil Aviation Rajiv Bansal, stated his ministry was updating its ‘Guidelines for International Arrivals’ in view of a decline in coronavirus cases.

“In view of the above, this ministry is updating its ‘Guidelines for International Arrivals’, and dropping the existing requirements of pre-departure Covid-19 testing and uploading of the Self-Health Declaration on the Ministry of Civil Aviation’s ‘Air Suvidha’ portal applicable for international travellers coming from/via China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Republic of Korea, Thailand and Japan,” the letter stated.

In order to monitor infections due to mutated variants of SARS-CoV-2 among international travellers to India, the present exercise of random testing of two per cent travellers irrespective of their country of origin upon arrival in India shall continue, it stated.

Government of India drops COVID-19 testing and uploading of 'Air Suvidha' form for international arrivals from/via China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Thailand and Japan pic.twitter.com/TIkSnZfTNt

— ANI (@ANI) February 10, 2023

On Thursday, Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention said the possibility of a large new wave of Covid-19 is relatively low in the coming months in China.

WHAT CHINESE SCIENTISTS SAY

The world should “calm down” about the possibility of new Covid-19 variants circulating in China, leading Chinese scientist George Gao said.

A paper by Gao and colleagues published in the Lancet medical journal on Wednesday showed that no new variants had emerged in the initial weeks of China’s recent outbreak, after the end of its zero-Covid policy saw a huge wave of cases.

“The world should completely calm down from the fear that there are new variants or special variants circulating (in China),” Gao, professor at the Institute of Microbiology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told Reuters.

The variants causing infections in China were the same Omicron sub-variants – BA.5.2 and BF.7 – seen elsewhere in the world, he said by email.

The study analysed 413 new Covid cases in Beijing from November 14 to December 20, 2022, and found all were likely caused by existing strains. It found that 90 per cent of the majority of locally-acquired infections were due to the above two sub-variants.