Maharashtra Tourism Minister Aaditya Thackeray on Wednesday defended the state’s stricter guidelines for air passengers , saying that the ...
Maharashtra Tourism Minister Aaditya Thackeray on Wednesday defended the state’s stricter guidelines for air passengers, saying that the state was “hit first and the hardest” by Covid-19 and so it needed to be cautious, NDTV reported.
“For us [Maharashtra government], what comes first and matters the most is safety of citizens,” Thackeray told the channel. He said that Maharashtra has only recently come out of the second wave of Covid-19 and that the virus is still around.
Thackeray made the statement amid concerns about the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, which the World Health Organization has classified as a variant of concern.
The minister said that the state had revised its coronavirus protocol, but added that the guidelines will still be different from those issued by the Centre.
In an order on Tuesday, the Maharashtra government had made Covid testing and quarantine mandatory for all international passengers arriving at airports in the state, irrespective of whether they arrived from countries deemed “at-risk”.
The state government added that RT-PCR tests will be conducted on flyers from at-risk countries thrice – on the second, fourth and seventh days after their arrival.
The state had also made RT-PCR negative test reports mandatory for all domestic passengers. This rule has now been relaxed in the new guidelines released on Wednesday.
The Maharashtra government has now partially relaxed its guidelines...
