09 March 2020•Update: 09 March 2020
ANKARA
Ugandan authorities have denied entry of 22 foreign delegates, who headed to the country to attend Uganda-EU Business Forum, due to coronavirus fears, local media reported on Monday.
"Yesterday [Saturday], we received 22 passengers from the category 1 countries [...]. None of them exhibited signs and symptoms of COVID-19. We informed them about our procedure of self-quarantine for 14 days. However, they were not willing to undergo this self-quarantine," Uganda’s Health Minister Jane Ruth Aceng said on Twitter on Sunday.
Aceng did not mention which countries the foreign delegates had come from.
On Saturday, the Ugandan Ministry of Health advised travelers from countries with high numbers of coronavirus cases to avoid traveling to Uganda “unless for essential reasons,” according to the Observer website.
As part of preventive measures by Kampala against the coronavirus outbreak, Ugandan authorities have also issued a travel ban on its nationals, who were planning to travel to the virus-hit countries classified as category 1 countries.
No case of coronavirus has yet been reported in Uganda.
The global death toll from the virus is around 3,800, with more than 109,000 confirmed cases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
After declaring the outbreak an international health emergency in January, the WHO last month updated the global risk level to “very high.”
