| Update: As it turns out, the lab being used at Amritsar Airport made an error, and is to blame for most of the positive coronavirus cases. You can find the original post below. |
Remember how yesterday I wrote about 125 people on a charter flight from Italy to India testing positive for coronavirus, accounting for 78% of the people tested? Well, today 173 people on a charter flight from Italy to India tested positive for coronavirus, accounting for 82% of the people tested.
Flight has 82% COVID-19 testing positivity rate
A charter flight that landed in India today had even more positive coronavirus cases than that the previous flight. The flight in question was YU632, a charter flight on EuroAtlantic Airways, which is a Portuguese charter company. The airline was operating a flight from Rome, Italy (FCO), to Amritsar, India (ATQ).
After a flight of just over seven hours, the plane landed in India earlier today, and passengers were tested on arrival (as is the standard requirement when coming from a “high-risk” country):
- There were 285 passengers, but only 210 passengers had to get tested, since the requirement doesn’t apply to children
- Of the 210 passengers tested, at least 173 tested positive
- That means the test positivity rate was 82%; crunching the numbers, I would guess that probably at least ~234 passengers actually have coronavirus, since kids aren’t being tested (and probably even more, since kids are less likely to be vaccinated)
- Passengers who tested positive will be put into quarantine, but who knows if they’ll stay; on the previous flight, 13 people “escaped” the quarantine facility
You know the wildest part of this story? The plane that was operating this route was the exact same plane that carried the people to India a couple of days before, where there were at least 125 positive cases. The Boeing 767-300 with the registration code CS-TST flew from Milan to Amritsar on Wednesday, then it flew to Rome, and then it flew back to Amritsar, arriving today.
I’m still extremely confused
I’m not sure what confuses me most:
- How can 82% of people test positive for coronavirus at the same time? I get omicron is highly contagious, but I feel like even if you intended for everyone to get it, you couldn’t plan to have that many people test positive at once
- What exactly were these charter flights for? I’m starting to think that maybe the flights were carrying workers who lived together in close quarters, because that’s the only reasonable explanation I can come up with? That also doesn’t really make sense, given the number of children onboard…
- How does EuroAtlantic have any non-infected crews left to work these flights?
- EuroAtlantic has several more of these charters planned, so will India allows these flights to continue to operate?
There must be some connection between these infections and the type of charter flights, since these are back-to-back flights not only on the same airline, but even on the same airplane. I’m almost starting to wonder if these charter flights are somehow intended for people actively infected with coronavirus?
Bottom line
Two EuroAtlantic Airways charter flights just two days apart have each had well over 100 people test positive for coronavirus on arrival. In the past we’ve seen flights with a 10% positivity rate, or maybe a couple of dozen infected passengers.
But the same Boeing 767 full of passengers delivered 125 positive coronavirus tests on Wednesday, and 173 coronavirus tests today. And there are definitely more cases than that, given the number of passengers who weren’t even tested.
Does anyone have more info here as to who exactly these passengers are?
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