Calls for South Africa to ban travel – or at the very least quarantine visitors – from India are growing among local politicians and medical experts. Several nations have recently banned travellers from India due to the worsening Covid-19 crisis which has killed close to 4,000 people in the past 24 hours.
India is being ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic, accounting for 25% of all worldwide deaths reported between 26 April and 2 May. India accounted for almost half of the 5.7 million new Covid-19 cases reported globally last week.
Morgues and crematoriums are overwhelmed. Hospitals are crippled by dire oxygen shortages with India relying on ventilators supplied by foreign aid. More than 226,000 people have died due to Covid-19 since the start of the outbreak last year. A quarter of these deaths occurred in the past month alone.
This swell of infections and fatalities is being driven by the B.1.617 variant, which has caught the attention of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD).
Dozens of countries have shut their borders to travellers from India, for fear of importing the new variant, over the past week. This includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, and Nigeria. Even Tanzania, which has been lacklustre in its approach to combatting Covid-19, announced that it had suspended all flights to and from India.
