Tunisia officially opened its land, air and sea borders on Saturday after a closure which lasted about three months, imposed by preventive measures aimed at limiting the spread of COVID-19.
At Tunis-Carthage international airport, towards the northern suburbs of Tunis, activity has gradually returned to normal, with the flow of hundreds of people preparing to disembark on planes bound for several capitals and European cities, including Paris and Nice (France), Rome (Italy) and Geneva (Switzerland), saw a journalist from Xinhua.
Aircraft from the Tunisian airline, Tunisair, will assume these flights while the airport is preparing to receive a French plane from Paris in the coming hours.
Before the Tunisian plane took off for Paris, Mahmoud Ben Ramadan, a 49-year-old passenger, told Xinhua that he was happy to see the airport reopen, because he could return to his residence in Paris, where he works as a communications and information engineer.
For her part, Khadija Oueslati said that she lived in the Swiss city of Geneva and that she had been stuck in Tunisia since her family’s visit last March. Ms. Oueslati is preparing to return to her hometown today.
In order to ensure the success of the process of opening borders, the Tunisian Ministry of Health has implemented a health protocol to ensure the safety of Tunisians in their country and abroad.
This protocol relates to a classification of the countries of the world on the propagation of COVID-19, with three zones: green, orange and red, as well as on the actions to be undertaken in relation to each region.
Indeed, the green zones include countries with a low prevalence of contamination and include around 45 countries, including China, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, where arrivals will not be subject to special preventive measures.
As for the “orange” regions, they include the countries with an average prevalence of the virus, including Iran, Lebanon, France and Spain, where the passengers who will come from there will be subjected to voluntary auto-quarantine for 14 days without any other procedure except in the event that symptoms appear.
Passengers affected by this category must have an RT-PCR test carried out at least 72 hours before their arrival in Tunisia, we learned from the Tunisian Ministry of Health.
In this sense, “the Tunisian airline is ready to ensure safe flights according to the necessary protection and prevention standards with a filling rate which does not exceed 40%”, revealed the president and managing director of Tunisair, Elyes Menkbi.
“The company has succeeded in meeting the challenges by repatriating more than 25,000 Tunisians stranded abroad but also by ensuring the supply of the country in large quantities of medical equipment, in record time,” assured the head of Tunisair.
And to insist that Tunisair “will always support the economy of the country and will remain the ambassador of the Tunisian identity throughout the world and constitutes an asset which cannot be privatized, in spite of the smear campaigns which target it”. F
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