Photo: Wechat account of Nanjing Lukou International Airport

Nanjing Lukou International Airport, which has been "ground zero" for China's latest COVID-19 flare-up will not resume flights on Thursday, with all scheduled flights to be cancelled, according to flight tracking platform VariFlight.

The news came after media reported earlier that some airlines of China Eastern Airlines planned to resume operations at the airport on Thursday.

Earlier on Wednesday, tickets for China Eastern Airlines flights from Nanjing to cities in East China's Shandong Province were available from Thursday, according to online ticket platform ctrip.com. As of 5:00 pm the tickets appeared to have been removed from the platform.

China Eastern confirmed to the Global Times that no flights would be departing Nanjing Lukou airport on Thursday.  

Tickets for Friday flights on China Eastern from Nanjing to Shandong were still available.

Xiamen Airlines will resume services from Nanjing to Xiamen, East China's Fujian Province on Saturday. 

However, the official WeChat account of Lukou airport has yet to publish any specific details.  

Feng Zhenglin, director of Civil Aviation Administration of China, said on August 4 that the administration has been working closely with local authorities to control the spread of the virus, including a deep sanitization of the airport and the deployment of staff to coordinate the safe resumption of flights at Nanjing airport.

On August 16, Wang Siyuan, an official from the Jiangsu Provincial Government told a press conference that disinfection work for homes belonging to residences of those who had tested positive at Nanjing Lukou airport was completed.

According to data from industry information provider VariFlight, flights from Nanjing airport have been suspended since July 26.

China's latest flare-up of infections originated from an inbound Russian flight that landed in Nanjing on July 10. The cleaning staff working at the international terminal improperly handled rubbish and waste material, inadvertently mingling international and domestic areas of the airport, resulting in transmission among staff, triggering a broad spike in infections.