Air Seychelles back to Jo’burg tomorrow - Travel restrictions lifted

Air Seychelles will restart its flights to Johannesburg on January 7. (Air Seychelles)

(Seychelles News Agency) - Seychelles has revised its advisory that restricted travel from seven southern African countries, introduced on November 27, to curb the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 as it is now widespread around the world and has also been detected in the small island nation.

From January 6, travellers from South Africa, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe are able to travel to Seychelles again.

The Public Health Commissioner, Jude Gedeon, told a press conference on Thursday that the travel restriction to those countries was imposed to curtail the entry of Omicron “but now that laboratory tests have shown that we already have the variant, there is no point in keeping the countries on the restricted list.”

Air Seychelles will restart its flights to Johannesburg on January 7 and continue flying once a week, an Air Seychelles spokesperson confirmed to SNA.

Meanwhile, Gedeon has expressed concern over the rapid increase in positive cases of COVID-19 in just over a week but no new restriction measures have been put in place.

He said that the total number of active cases in Seychelles is 2,481, with an increase of 2,180 cases since December 30, when the country had 621 active cases. However, the number of deaths as a result of the virus has not increased, which remains at 134 since the start of the pandemic.

"We have seen during the festive period, parties were taking place, people were mixing households and this is what has caused this surge that we are facing now,” he said.

Gedeon said that with the current spike in active cases, the record of active cases in a day, which was 629 in May last year, has been broken and is now 692.

“The current trend is more acute than the previous surge that we had early last year around May when the highest registered number of active cases was 3,046. It appears that we can have a higher number of active cases based on the current trend that we are seeing,” he warned.

No new health measures were announced but Gedeon said that group sports will not be allowed to take place because of the close contact between players. He also added that Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education officials will meet to decide on school calendars. Public schools are scheduled to open in around 10 days.

Meanwhile, Seychelles, an archipelago in the western Indian Ocean, is continuing its vaccination efforts and people who have taken two doses of a COVID vaccine are being encouraged by the health authorities to have a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine being offered at the moment.