Saudi Arabia has announced restrictions for those of its citizens travelling to India and 15 other countries after resurgence in COVID cases.
The countries that Saudi Arabia has asked its citizens to avoid travelling to are India, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Indonesia, Vietnam, Armenia, Belarus, and Venezuela, The Times Now reported.
The travel ban was notified by the Saudi government’s Directorate General of Passports. At present, the restrictions apply to the citizens of Saudi Arabia who wish to travel to the above mentioned countries.
However, no new norms have been issued on whether Indian nationals will be barred from entering the gulf country or not.
The health ministry of Saudi Arabia also assured that the country has not reported any cases of monkeypox yet. “Until now, cases of transmission between humans are very limited, and therefore the possibility of any outbreaks occurring from it, even in countries that have detected cases, are very low,” said Abdullah Asiri, Deputy Minister of Health for preventive health.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recently said that the Covid- pandemic is “most certainly not over”. Though there’s been a decline in reported cases since the omicron wave, the pandemic is not yet gone. WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “We lower our guard at our peril.”
He said that “declining testing and sequencing means we are blinding ourselves to the evolution of the virus.” Almost 1 billion people in lower-income countries are not yet vaccinated, according to Ghebreyesus.
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