Kuwait allows non-citizens to enter country from today
Travellers arriving on direct flights from high risk countries will have to resort to institutional quarantine in one of the local hotels for 14 days
Kuwait will allow non-Kuwaiti citizens to enter the country starting from Feb.21 with some new procedures, the civil aviation authority said in a statement late on Friday.
Travellers arriving on direct flights from high risk countries will have to resort to institutional quarantine in one of the local hotels for 14 days, while travellers coming from the rest of the world will have to quarantine institutionally for one week and another at home.
Kuwait suspended entry for non-citizens for two weeks starting from Feb.7 amid efforts to deal with the coronavirus.
Recently, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that only around one per cent of the wider Middle East region’s population had received a first coronavirus vaccine shot.
The UN body released its data for what it calls the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMRO) of nearly 600 million people, stretching from Morocco to Pakistan — but excluding Israel.
WHO’S Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMRO) comprises 21 member states and is home to some 583 million people.
But while it includes the Palestinian Territories, it does not include Israel, the country in the region with the biggest mass vaccination campaign.
Meanwhile, it was reported that the US airline industry is pledging to expand the practice of asking passengers on flights to the United States for information that public health officials could use for contact tracing during the pandemic.
An industry trade group said that the carriers would turn over the information to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which could use it to contact passengers who might be exposed to the virus that causes COVID-19.
Delta and United have been doing that since December. On Friday, an industry trade group said that American, Southwest, Alaska, Jetblue and Hawaiian will also ask passengers to make their names, phone numbers, email and physical addresses available to the CDC.
The airlines had long resisted government efforts to require them to gather passenger information and provide it to health agencies.
They said they don’t have the information on passengers who buy tickets from other sellers such as online travel agencies. They also argued that gathering the information and making it immediately available to the government would be time-consuming and require costly upgrades to computer systems.
The CEO of trade group airlines for America, Nicholas Calio, said carriers hope that their offer of voluntary information gathering, along with testing of passengers entering the US, will lead the government to lit restrictions on international travel.
Although the requests are only voluntary, United airlines said on Friday that since December most of its international customers have provided contact details.
In a separate development, Russia will resume flights to Egypt’s Red Sea resorts in March ater the liting of a ban imposed following a 2015 atack on a Russian jet, an aviation official said.
Flights “to the two cities of Sharm Al Sheikh and Hurghada will resume on March 28 via the Russian company Nordwind at a rate of four per week”, said Ashraf Noweir, Egypt’s civil aviation chief, quoted by pro-government daily Al-ahram.
He said Russian authorities have approved the resumption of flights to the cities in the Sinai Peninsula.
Moscow banned direct flights to Egypt ater a bomb atack in October 2015 on a Russian-owned Airbus jet as it took off from the seaside resort of Sharm Al Sheikh that killed 224 people.
In April 2018, Moscow announced the resumption of flights to Cairo but not to the Red Sea coast, a popular destination for Russian tourists.
The United Kingdom, which had also suspended air links with the peninsula in 2015, relaunched flights to Sharm Al Sheikh at the end of 2019.
While the sector recorded a rebound of nearly $13 billion in revenue for 2018-2019, tourism in Egypt was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, with official figures showing a drop of more than 20 per cent in revenues for 2019-2020.