Singapore Airlines cancels dozens of international flights to Australia

Sydney, Australia, Sep 15 (EFE).- Singapore Airlines has canceled dozens of flights to Australia due to uncertainty surrounding the government lifting limits on international arrivals, according to a company spokesman on Wednesday.

The suspension of flights between October and December will affect more than 30,000 Australians who are stranded abroad as a result of the decision of the Canberra government to close international borders in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with some exceptions.

“We’ve had to make the very difficult decision that we simply can’t operate the two additional flights that we were hoping to do into Sydney and to other ports across Australia,” Karl Schubert, head of corporate affairs for Singapore Airlines South West Pacific, told national broadcaster ABC radio.

“We just don’t have the clarity we need to have the confidence to operate.”

However, Schubert clarified to the ABC that the airline that will maintain its two daily flights to Australia, on which it carries a maximum of 25 passengers until travel can be normalized.

Australia intends to progressively reopen its borders by the end of the year when 80 percent of its adult population is fully vaccinated, allowing caps on international arrivals of Australians to be lifted and entry limits increased for students and immigrants.

At the end of August, Australia limited entries to the country to 3,000 people per week as a result of the worsening of the health crisis caused by the spread of the Delta variant in Greater Sydney, which has been in lockdown since June 26.

In New South Wales, 1,259 local infections and 12 deaths were reported Wednesday, while in the neighboring state of Victoria, whose capital Melbourne is also in lockdown, 423 patients and two deaths were reported.

The Australian Capital Territory, which includes Canberra, is also in lockdown and recorded 12 infections.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Australia has accumulated more than 78,000 cases of Covid-19 and more than 1,100 deaths. It has fully vaccinated more than 40 percent of its eligible population. EFE

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