125 passengers on Air India's Italy-Amritsar flight test Covid positive

Chandigarh, Jan 06: A total of 125 passengers flying from Italy to Amritsar have tested Covid positive on arrival at Amritsar airport. The flight had 179 passengers on board.

Officials said there were a total of 179 passengers on the charter flight YU-661 that landed at the Amritsar airport at around 1.30 PM on Wednesday.

Since Italy is one of the "at risk" countries according to the Union Health Ministry, all eligible passengers -- 160 in this case -- were tested for COVID-19 and 125 of them were found to be positive, they mentioned.

Out of total 179 passengers, 19 were children or infant so they were exempt from on-arrival RT-PCR testing, they said.

The charter flight between Milan in Italy and Amritsar in Punjab was operated by Portuguese company EuroAtlantic Airways, they mentioned.

Meanwhile, the Centre has urged nine states and union territories to ramp up COVID-19 testing to ensure that infected people do not spread the virus to others.

In a letter to Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Jammu and Kashmir and Bihar, Additional Secretary of Union Health Ministry Arti Ahuja pointed out a considerable decline in COVID-19 testing amid rising cases and positivity rate and said it is a "cause of concern".

In the absence of sufficient testing, it is rather impossible to determine the true level of infection spread in the community, Ahuja said in her letter dated January 5.

India on Thursday saw the biggest single-day jump of 495 Omicron cases, taking the total number of infections of the new variant of coronavirus to 2,630. Of the total cases, Maharashtra has the maximum at 797. The country reported 90,928 fresh coronavirus infections, the highest in over 200 days, that pushed its caseload to 3,51,09,286.