Eight private jets carrying some super wealthy Indians have landed in London ahead of the travel ban placed on India by the United Kingdom (UK).
TheNewsGuru.com (TNG) reports the travel ban placed on India by the UK started 4 a.m. local time on Friday.
The private jets carrying the super wealthy Indians left Dubai on Thursday to collect passengers in Mumbai.
The luxury airliners, VistaJet Bombardier Global 6000, landed at 3:15 a.m., just 44 minutes before the restrictions took place.
As of Friday, any Britons returning from India must quarantine for 10 days in a government-approved hotel.
All non-British or non-Irish citizens will be banned entirely from entering the country if they have been in India in the previous 10 days.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had to cancel his own state visit to India scheduled for next week as a “precautionary measure”.
The private jet passengers, who were not named, were fleeing unimaginable horror back home.
At least 14 COVID-19 patients perished in a devastating fire that ripped through an ICU ward in one of India’s overcrowded hospitals about 70 miles outside Mumbai.
The fire that broke out around 3 a.m. Friday morning was contained and extinguished, but not before 14 patients—many who were intubated and hard to evacuate—had died.
“Around 90 patients were admitted to the hospital at the time of the incident,” Dilip Shah, the head of the Vijay Vallabh Hospital where it happened, said in a statement on Friday.
Earlier in the week, an oxygen leak in Maharashtra state, near where the fire broke out, resulted in the death of 24 COVID-19 patients who were on ventilators.
To make terrible matters even worse, India reported its highest one-day number of cases, recording 332,730 new infections in a 24-hour period. In the same period, 2,263 people died with COVID-19.
India has been overwhelmed by new cases coupled with a critical shortage of oxygen, hospital beds, and now ventilators. Many desperate families have been forced to turn to black-market price gougers who have been able to buy hospital space from corrupt administrators.
The spike in cases comes as political rallies are still being held and after a month-long religious ceremony continues to bring millions of people to the Ganges River.
India Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been criticized for not calling a national lockdown to try to mitigate the spread and for hosting rallies ahead of elections in May.
Government officials have said the previous lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic was economically devastating to many manual laborers who then traveled by foot from home cities to their villages, carrying the virus with them.
The development forced the UK government to place the travel ban on India, leaving the super rich fleeing the country.