Mozambique is on the list of ten countries that Canada announced today will again be authorised to carry out direct flights to Canadian territory.
The announcement was made by the Canadian Minister of Health, Jean-Yves Duclos, at a press conference.
Flights from the 10 countries – Botswana, Essuatini, Egypt, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe – will again be permitted from 00:00 on Saturday.
The existing ban was justified following the emergence of the Omicron variant, after confirming that large-scale community transmission of this new strain of the virus is already present in Canada.
In the announcement, Jean-Yves Duclos added that the need for all people arriving by plane to take the PCR test within 72 hours before travelling to the country will be reinstated.
Duclos considered that in view of the Community transmission of the Omicron variant in Canada, it no longer made sense to maintain the ban on these flights.
Today, the province of Quebec announced 3,768 new cases of covid-19, a record number since the pandemic began, while the neighbouring province of Ontario recorded 3,124 cases.
Across the country, the number of cases of the disease is rising rapidly due to the spread of the Omicron variant.
On Thursday, 6,943 infections were recorded nationwide, 120% more than last December 1.
This week, Canada’s medical director, Theresa Tam, warned that in the coming days the number of daily cases could reach 12,000, although the most pessimistic forecasts point to up to 26,000 daily cases.
Faced with this situation, all provinces in the country are enforcing new restrictions on Christmas holidays and the federal government warned this week that Canadians should cancel all international travel deemed non-essential.
Covid-19 has caused more than 5.33 million deaths worldwide since the start of the pandemic, according to the most recent tally from the Agence France-Presse.
The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, and currently with variants identified in several countries.
A new variant, Omicron, classified as “worrying” by the World Health Organization (WHO), was detected in southern Africa, but since South African health authorities sounded the alert on November 24, infections have been reported in at least 77 countries on all continents, including Portugal.
