Explain flight from India

THE landing of Garuda Indonesia Flight GA-7610 on Jackson International Airport last Thursday has raised concerns and fears for the health of Papua New Guineans and others in the country.
The Government had in April banned all flights originating from India to protect all from the Coronavirus (Covid-19) Delta variant.
So, the landing and disembarking of passengers from GA-7610 which originated from India was a public shock.
Moreover, despite the ban, the Pandemic Response Controller and Police Comm David Manning had approved the flight and that too for only 42 passengers.
So, how did extra “illegal” air passengers disembarked in Jackson International Airport?
The highly infectious Delta was first detected in India in October and it led to a massive second wave of Covid cases in the country.
Since then, the highly infectious strain has spread globally.
CNBC reported on July 23 that Delta has usurped the previously dominant alpha variant, first detected in the United Kingdom last fall and has prompted further waves of infections in Europe and an ominous incline in cases in the United States.
Since then, the highly-infectious strain has spread globally.
Delta now makes up 83 per cent of all sequenced cases in the US, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr Rochelle Walensky said, marking a dramatic rise from 50 per cent the week of July 3.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has already warned that, based on the estimated transmission advantage of Delta, “it is expected that it will rapidly outcompete other variants and become the dominant circulating lineage over the coming months”.
In its latest weekly report, WHO noted that as of July 20, the prevalence of Delta among the specimens sequenced over the past four weeks exceeded 75 per cent in many countries worldwide including Australia, Bangladesh, Botswana, China, Denmark, India, Indonesia, Israel, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa and the UK. But what of India where Delta first emerged in October?
The situation is still bad, data shows, but not as bad as it was when the second wave peaked in the country, when daily new cases were more than 400,000.
On May 7, India reported a staggering 414,188 new infections and several thousand deaths.
Fortunately, cases have declined significantly since then.
If developed nations such as the US and the UK can be brought down to their knees by Delta and struggle to contain the virus, imagine what it would do to PNG.
Chartered flights from India, such as GA-7610, have been organised by CapaJet (headquartered in Hong Kong) since Aug 19 last year.
Its website describes the company as a luxury charter flight service provider.
In August last year, its New Delhi office said CapaJet would be operating new flights beginning Aug 19 targeting key routes in South East Asia and the Pacific.
The flights would operate from Jakarta, New Delhi, Port Moresby, Nadi, and touch down in Delhi, Singapore and Jakarta.
The company said its flights would operate in compliance with directives from the External Affairs Ministry and the Department of Civil Aviation India to bring back stranded Indians in the country.
The company provides the Delhi-Jakarta-POM-Nadi-Colombo-Delhi flight route, operated by Garuda Airways.
On March 25, it announced on its website the following flights – April 22, May 22, June 22.
But the PNG Government had in April banned all flights from India.