It has also informed the public about the zero detection of monkeypox in the country.
The re-outbreak of Covid-19 and the rising number of Covid cases in the past few weeks have led to Saudi Arabia banning its citizens from travelling to sixteen countries, including India.
The sixteen countries listed by Saudi Arabia apart from India include Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Indonesia, Vietnam, Armenia, Belarus, and Venezuela.
In the last 24 hours, India has recorded as many as 2,226 new COVID-19 cases, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in India informed on Sunday. The total COVID-19 cases in India rose to 4,31,36,371 that includes 14,955 active. There are around 1.54 million Indians in Saudi Arabia who would be affected by this decision.
The Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia has also informed the public that zero monkeypox cases have been detected in the country. Deputy Minister of Health for preventive health Abdullah Asiri has assured that the Kingdom is well prepared to fight in case the virus enters the region and can monitor and discover any suspected monkeypox cases.
The emergence of monkeypox has put the countries across the world in a state of wariness, with several countries trying to prepare themselves to avoid another Covid-19 like a catastrophe. A World Health Organization (WHO) report on the outbreak confirmed 92 cases and 28 suspected cases of monkeypox in Europe, Canada, the United States, and Australia.
Meanwhile, the U.N health agency’s director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned the nations from lowering their guard against Covid-19. He said that the COVID-19 pandemic is “most certainly not over,” despite a decline in reported cases since the peak of the omicron wave. He further asserted that “we lower our guard at our peril.”
Ghebreyesus told the officials gathered in Geneva for the opening of the WHO’s annual meeting that “declining testing and sequencing means we are blinding ourselves to the evolution of the virus.” He pointed out the fact that almost 1 billion people in lower-income countries still haven’t been vaccinated.
