India’s government has announced that it will ban all scheduled international commercial passenger flights from landing in the country from March 22 for one week to contain the spread of COVID-19.
“No scheduled international commercial passenger flights shall be allowed to land in India from March 22 for one week,” said the government in a statement.
This comes after the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said the global air transport industry could see 113 billion dollars of revenue losses for the passenger business in 2020 as novel coronavirus snowballs into a public health emergency.
Meanwhile, the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) said Asian airlines are facing revenue shortfalls of over 60 billion dollars this year as a result of sharp falls in demand which have already forced the grounding of over half the fleet. By the same token, it said, many of the one million workers are unable to work because of drastic reductions in operations due to COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the total number of positive cases of COVID-19 in India stands at 167 (including 25 foreigners), 4 deaths (1 each) in Delhi, Karnataka, Punjab and Maharashtra.
