COVID-19 update: Saudi Arabia bans flights to India and 15 other nations

In a recent development, Saudi Arabia has banned all international flights to India and 15 other nations following the re-outbreak of Coronavirus. The country has banned its citizens from travelling to these 16 countries due to the increasing numbers of daily COVID cases over the past few weeks. Apparently, on Sunday, India reported more than 2000 new Coronavirus cases.

The other countries include Turkey, Vietnam, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Armenia, Belarus, and Venezuela.
On the other hand, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has also said that the COVID-19 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.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, 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."
Not only this, he also stated that almost 1 billion people in lower-income countries are not yet vaccinated.

Also, monkeypox is another issue but the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia has assured there is no such case in the country yet. Abdullah Asiri, Deputy Minister of Health for preventive health said, "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".