7-day mandatory quarantine for international passengers in India

New Delhi : People traveling to India from abroad will now have to go under mandatory seven-day quarantine and then take a test on the eighth day. The new rules comes in effect after huge surge in coronavirus cases in recent days.

Currently, 19 countries have been marked as "at-risk" nations.

All international passengers will have to go under mandatory seven-day quarantine and then take a RT-PCR test; if they test positive then they will be sent to a isolation facility and their sample will be sent for genome sequencing.

Passengers seated near them and cabin crew will be considered as their contacts.

If the test is negative, the passengers "will further self-monitor their health for next seven days", the rules say.

For flights from countries that are not on the "at-risk" list, two per cent of the passengers picked randomly, will be tested on arrival.

The new rules have been reported on a day when India recorded 1,17,100 new cases of coronavirus cases. Cases have gone from 10,000 to more than a lakh in just a week as the virus spreads at an unprecedented pace, driven by the Omicron variant.

The rules for those arriving from countries "at-risk" remain the same - they have to take a test and wait for the results before leaving or taking a connecting flight.