Canada May Suspend Flights From India: Trudeau and Dr. Theresa Tam Weigh In
April 21, 2021 Jim Byers
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has opened the door to a Canadian ban on flights from India, and Canada’s chief public health officer seems to concur.
Speaking to the media on Tuesday, Trudeau was asked if Canada might follow the lead of other countries and suspend flights from India, which has seen a surge in a new COVID-19 variant.
“We are continuing to look at more and I have asked our officials to look carefully at, for example, what the U.K. has done very recently on suspending flights from India,” the Prime Minister said.
Canadian Press reports that Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam today said Ottawa generally has opted for travel measures that are not country-specific — such as a pre-boarding tests for COVID-19, tests on arrival and government-mandated quarantines.
But she said India could be a special case due to a “variant of interest” there that may be fuelling a massive COVID-19 outbreak.
India recorded nearly 300,000 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday alone, with 2,000 more deaths linked to the virus.
According to the federal government, 35 flights from India have arrived in Canada in the last two weeks, bringing with them with at least one case of COVID-19.
Ontario’s government says it is “pleading” with Ottawa to ban travel from India and other hot-spot countries, Canadian Press said.
Canada last December suspended flights from the U.K. for almost two weeks because of concerns about the so-called British variant making its way across the sea.
In the last two weeks, 117 international flights arrived in Canada with at least one passenger who later tested positive for COVID-19, including 29 flights from Delhi, 20 from the United States and 24 from Europe, the Globe and Mail reports.
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