Non-Iranian passengers arriving at Iran’s main international airport should provide negative COVID-19 tests or they will be deported, says a senior aviation official amid fresh restrictions imposed in Iran to curb the spread of the new coronaviris pandemic.
“Passengers with non-Iranian nationality will not be allowed into the country and will be deported if they do not produce a negative corona (virus) test,” said Mohammad Reza Karimian, deputy director of Imam Khomeini airport (IKA), on Saturday.
Karimian said that deportation would only apply to non-Iranian citizens and others failing to provide a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test will have to incur the costs of a test and a forced 48-hour quarantine that follows it.
The PCR tests should have been carried out less than four days before arrival in Iran by qualified authorities in the country of embarkation and results should be English, said the official.
He said new restrictions will come into force on July 15, adding that even passengers with a negative test could be subject to quarantine measures if they are deemed suspicious on arrival at IKA, an airport located to the southwest of Tehran.
Iran, the hardest hit country in the Middle East by COVID-19, is struggling to reduce the risk of imported disease cases amid increased international travel to the region.
A spokesman of the Iranian health ministry said on Saturday that the number of infections in the country had risen by 2,548 to reach a total of 306,752.
Sima Sadat Lari said some 16,982 people had died, including 216 patients over the past 24 hours, while there have been a total 265,830 recoveries from the virus since it was first reported in Iran in late February.