Q24N – Argentina will reschedule all international flights starting Monday, March 29, to space out arrivals and allow compliance with the new protocols in the face of a wave of COVID-19 infections, that country’s National Civil Aviation Administration (ANAC) reported on Saturday night.
The flights will keep the same days of arrival but “at different times, in order to establish a separation between the arrivals, which allows adequate compliance with the new sanitary protocols,” indicated a statement from the ANAC, clarifying that a distance of 120 will be established. minutes between arrivals.
“There is no phase change, or any other measure in addition to those already announced, but a mere rearrangement and redistribution of flights,” added ANAC.
An official operation to apply coronavirus tests began this Saturday at the Ezeiza international airport (EZE), in Greater Buenos Aires, to passengers from Brazil, Mexico and Chile.
The government announced on Friday that it will suspend flights from those three countries, in addition to the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, a measure to mitigate infections at a time when cases in Argentina are increasing, according to a provision published on Friday in the Official Gazette.
The borders will continue to be closed to tourism, according to the resolution, when daily infections reached 13,000 on Friday and this Saturday exceeded 10,000, the highest figures in two months.
“It seems to me that we are close to the second wave. All the countries that surround us are experiencing it,” said President Alberto Fernández in an interview on Saturday night with the C5N news channel.
The president said that in the next week he will propose “a series of measures to deepen care and minimize circulation.” The measures “have to do with lowering circulation in general. It is not returning to strict isolation. It is also drawing people’s attention. We are in trouble,” he warned.
“What we have been noticing is a sustained growth (of cases). Not abrupt but sustained. We made more adjustments on the departure from Argentina. We reduced the number of flights and made some commitments to those who travel,” he said.
Based on the new provision, Argentines or resident foreigners who return to the country must undergo a test upon arrival and, in case of negative, isolate themselves anyway until a second test is carried out seven days later.
If they test positive, they are isolated in a hotel until “verifying by genomic sequencing tests if it is the lineages that are considered to be of the highest epidemiological risk”, alluding to the British and Manaus variants.
Argentina, with 44 million inhabitants, exceeds 2.3 million cases since the beginning of the pandemic with 55,368 deaths.
