Bengal currently has over 74,700 active Covid cases (File)
Air passengers from Delhi and four other states will have to carry Covid-negative certificates, not older than 72 hours, to enter West Bengal from April 26, the state government has informed the centre.
The poll-bound state had reported 1,274 coronavirus cases on April 1. However, just three weeks later, its daily Covid-figure crossed the 10,000-mark. On Friday, the state reported highest-ever 12,876 coronavirus cases. A day before, it had logged 11,948 cases.
Bengal currently has over 74,700 active cases.
In a letter to the Civil Aviation Department, the Bengal government wrote that passengers from Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh - all badly hit by the coronavirus pandemic's second wave - will have to produce a negative RT-PCR test report to travel to the state.
The rule already exists for passengers from worst-hit Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka and Telangana.
India on Friday logged 3,32,730 new COVID-19 cases, the highest single-day spike since the pandemic started last year. This was the second consecutive day that the country reported over three lakh cases.
Bengal is one of the twelve states leading the coronavirus surge in the country.
While Maharashtra is currently the worst sufferer of the pandemic, Delhi is the city with the highest daily cases in the country as of now.
The "high Covid-burden" states have been reporting shortages of hospital beds, medicines and life-saving medical oxygen.
The Bengal order came on a day an analysis by the National Centre for Disease Control said the UK strain of the virus was driving the Covid surge in the national capital. It said over 400 cases of the UK strain and 76 cases of the Indian double-mutant variant were found in Delhi.