Masks a must at Kuwait airport • Egypt reports first Omicron cases

KUWAIT: The interior ministry announced domestic helpers will lose their residencies if they stay outside Kuwait for more than six months. Residencies will automatically be canceled if a resident on article 20 visa fails to return to Kuwait six months after the date of departure. The rule, which had been suspended during the pandemic, went into effect from Dec 1, 2021 (the six-month count starts from this date).

According to recent reports, Kuwait’s domestic sector is in dire need of housemaids and helpers after hundreds of thousands of expat workers left the country amid the pandemic. The Public Authority for Manpower is reported to have begun exploring new markets to recruit domestic workers with a view to resolve the problem of shortage in the local market. The shortage of domestic labor became acute after many countries that traditionally export domestic helpers to Gulf countries have begun to introduce restrictions on recruitments to these countries.

Meanwhile, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation yesterday renewed its call to the public to follow health measures and wear facemasks at all times at all terminals of Kuwait International Airport. The health ministry said late Friday that 81 people tested positive for COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, taking total cases to 413,972. Recoveries rose by 30 to 411,030, while the death toll from the pandemic remained unchanged at 2,466, the ministry’s spokesman Dr Abdullah Al-Sanad said. Three cases are in the ICU, while 12 patients at in COVID-19 wards, in addition to 476 others being treated.

Egypt yesterday said it had detected its first three cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant, at the height of the economically vital tourist season. Three Egyptians tested positive on their return from overseas, the health ministry said without specifying where they had travelled from. One of them had mild symptoms and the other two had none, it added.

The country’s air and tourism sectors, which suffered under global lockdowns for the past two years, had just started to recover and were counting on end-of-year holiday visits. Omicron is the biggest threat to global public health, the G7 group of economically developed democracies said last week. Scientists remain uncertain how dangerous the highly mutated Omicron variant is, but early data suggests it can be more resistant to vaccines and is more transmissible than the Delta variant.

From Dec 1, Egypt stepped up measures to control the spread of the virus. It barred officials and students not vaccinated against COVID-19 from government offices and universities unless they show a negative PCR test. The country has officially recorded 373,509 coronavirus cases, including 21,277 deaths. Egypt’s vaccination campaign, after initially lagging, has considerably accelerated in recent months with mobile units deployed.

Around 40 percent of the more than 102 million Egyptians have now received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to the government, but only 14 million of those have had two doses. Mask-wearing -which health experts consider a vital measure against coronavirus spread - is poorly respected in Cairo, a city of more than 20 million tightly-packed inhabitants. Tourism represents about a tenth of the GDP of Egypt, where a third of the population lives below the poverty line. — Agencies