Egyptian airports are scheduled to receive on Saturday five flights carrying 745 stranded expatriates returning from Kuwait over COVID-19 concerns, an Egyptian official told Xinhua.
“The five flights will take off later in the day heading to Egypt’s Cairo and Sohag airports,” said Haitham Saad Eddin, spokesman of the Ministry of Manpower.
The ministry was informed by its office at the Egyptian Embassy in Kuwait that the flights are part of about 25 flights run by the Kuwaiti airport for the departure of 4,210 foreigners back to their home countries, namely Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Lebanon, India, Pakistan and Nepal, Saad Eddin noted.
Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Egypt has returned more than 20,000 nationals stranded abroad in Arab, Asian and Western states, according to previous official remarks.
Egyptian Immigration Minister Nabila Makram said in February that the actual number of Egyptian expatriates is estimated at 13 million out of the country’s 100 million population.
Considered one of Egypt’s main sources of foreign currency, remittances of the Egyptian expatriates amounted to 26.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2019.
