Germany drastically reduce passenger traffic with India, classified as of Sunday in a high-risk area due to a new variant of the coronavirus appeared in this country, Health Minister Jens Spahn announced on Saturday.

“The new mutation of the virus discovered in India is of great concern to us. In order not to jeopardize our vaccination campaign, we must clearly reduce the traffic of travelers with India, ”the minister explained in an interview with the Funke media group.

As of Sunday, only citizens of German nationality will be able to travel from India to Germany, after presenting a negative test carried out shortly before the flight “and they must be quarantined for 14 days immediately after their arrival,” the minister said.

These regulations are expected to de facto reduce traffic between the two countries. Several countries, such as Canada, the United Kingdom and Kuwait, have adopted similar measures to prevent the pandemic from worsening due to this new variant.

On Saturday, India set a new record for the daily number of deaths from COVID-19 (more than 2,600) as the government struggles to provide oxygen to hospitals overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of new cases.

The total number of officially registered deaths since the start of the pandemic stands at almost 190,000 in this country of 1.3 billion people.

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