Canada looking into possible restrictions on flights from India

The federal government is looking into possible restrictions on flights arriving from India due to a massive surge of COVID-19 cases there.

Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer says normally countries don’t want to limit travel from specific countries, but India may present a special case.

Tam says they will be doing risk assessment to help make a decision.

India reported almost 315,000 cases on Thursday, the highest daily increase anywhere in the world since the pandemic began.

It also posted more than 2,100 new deaths.

A case involving the variant of interest that originated in India was detected in Quebec on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole says the federal government needs to immediately stop admitting flights from COVID-19 “hot spot” countries like India and Brazil.

He says the move would buy time to figure out a better plan for stopping variants of concern from getting into Canada.

The Liberals’ slow and incompetent pandemic response has allowed dangerous COVID variants into Canada. We must temporarily suspend flights from hot spot countries to secure the borders. pic.twitter.com/ERtHdPkbrn

— Conservative Party (@CPC_HQ) April 22, 2021

O’Toole doesn’t have specifics for what he thinks should happen to beef up border protections beyond not allowing flights to land from certain countries.

Health Canada says about one per cent of arriving passengers are testing positive but can’t say how many have tested positive after 10 days.