More than 70 people miss out on mercy flight from India due to positive COVID-19 tests

Australian citizens and residents miss chance to escape India after testing positive hours before boarding flight.

Australians stranded in India disembark a Qantas plane at Canberra Airport on Friday. Picture: AAP

More than 70 Australian citizens and residents will miss out on the chance to leave India after testing positive for COVID-19 or because they were a close contact of someone who had.

As the Morrison government’s flight ban on India came to an end on Friday night, a bolstered testing regime found more than 40 intended passengers on a Qantas-run repatriation flight from New Delhi to Darwin had coronavirus. A further 30 passengers were close contacts. The first Indian repatriation flight will now fly to Australia half-empty, with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade struggling to fill the 150-seat flight due to high testing requirements for passengers.

COVID-hit Australians who miss the flight will have to deal with a health system cracking under the pressure of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak, with India having recorded at least 300,000 infections each day since April 21.

Scott Morrison is working to ensure a restart of India-Australia flights this weekend does not lead to another spike in COVID-19 cases in Australian hotel quarantine. A spike in Indian-source cases led the Prime Minister to ban entries from India through the Biosecurity Act last month, and Australian citizens faced five-year jail terms and $66,000 fines if they attempted to circumvent the flight ban.

Mr Morrison said on Friday if he had not taken action to ban flights from India during the hotel quarantine spike, citizens could have been forced to wait months to return. “That pause has done its job. The number of cases that we had up in Howard Springs at that time was over 50. It is now down … the system is ready to respond,” he said. “Had we not undertaken that pause, then I think we would have put ourselves in a position where that would not have been possible, not just for a couple of weeks, but for months.”

The India flight ban has seen a 40 per cent drop in coronavirus cases in hotel quarantine sites across Australia, falling from 292 positive tests in hotels to 171.

At the Howard Springs quarantine facility in the Northern Territory, COVID cases have fallen from 53 to four. Cases in Queensland hotels are down to 18 from 82, and in Victoria cases have fallen to 19 from 87.

But Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong said the situation was “beyond heartbreaking”. “This flight was meant to bring home our most vulnerable and it is deeply troubling that so many have contracted COVID while waiting for the Morrison government to act,” she said.

In order to keep the level of COVID-19 in quarantine hotels low, Australian citizens and residents leaving India must now take two tests before they depart for Australia — one 48 hours before and one eight hours prior to takeoff. The Weekend Australian understands repatriation flights from New Delhi to Darwin will run every seven to nine days to help nearly 9000 stranded Australians come home, but commercial flights will ­remain banned for now. Council of Indian Australians president Nitin Shukla said while the flight ban had caused significant problems in his community, he backed the decision to keep coronavirus-positive people off flights. “We have to be careful with people who have contracted COVID until things become more normal,” he said.

High commissioner to India Barry O’Farrell told the ABC those people who tested positive would be eligible for future flights.