COVID-19: Over 298 positive tests on aircraft from Italy were investigated
Image credit: Sky News
Officials are looking into a private laboratory that has been suspected of performing incorrect COVID-19 tests on passengers on two flights from Italy last week.
At least 173 travellers from Rome and 125 from Milan tested positive upon arrival in Amritsar. Thirty of them were retested at the airport, but only three were determined to be COVID positive.
For the time being, airport officials have ceased using the lab’s services, SpiceHealth said.
Dr Charanjit Singh, Amritsar’s civil surgeon, said the preliminary investigations indicated that the machines’ controls were malfunctioning and that the matter was being probed at the “highest levels.”
Mr Singh went on to say that the Airports Authority of India (AAI) engaged SpiceHealth on December 15 to test travellers arriving from high-risk nations following government regulations.
The country is currently experiencing the pandemic’s third wave, which researchers believe is being led by the Omicron type. On Tuesday, it added around 167,000 fresh news cases.
SpiceHealth said in a statement that “we have chosen to perform a full technical investigation and decontamination” due to the “alarmingly high positive rate of passengers” on the two charter flights from Italy.
At least 13 people who tested positive on the aircraft from Milan were able to avoid institutional isolation.
As ambulances lined up outside the airport that day to transport afflicted travellers to the hospital, crowds gathered and chaos followed. Many passengers were enraged, claiming that their positive test results were false because they had tested negative before boarding the plane.
Several governments, including Punjab, where Amritsar is located, have imposed limitations to prevent the virus from spreading due to an increase in illnesses. Punjab has ordered the closure of schools and institutions, as well as a night curfew. More than 35 million COVID cases have been reported in the country, with around 484,000 fatalities as a result of the infection.
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