61 flyers on travel-ban-stalled flights test positive
The passengers on two flights from South Africa found themselves caught in a pandemic nightmare early Saturday as more countries placed travel bans on southern Africa amid fear of a new and possibly more dangerous variant of the coronavirus.
After about 30 hours squeezed together in the planes, crammed buses and then in waiting rooms, 61 of the more than 500 passengers on those flights had tested positive and been quarantined. They were being checked for omicron, named by the World Health Organization on Friday as a “variant of concern,” its most serious category.
Everyone else “has scattered to the world,” said Stephanie Nolen, The New York Times’ global health reporter, who was on one of the planes.
The chaos in Amsterdam seemed emblematic of the varied, and often scattershot, responses to the virus across the world, with masking rules, national testing requirements and vaccine mandates differ- ing from country to country and continent to continent. KLM, the airline operating the flights, said only some passengers had to show proof of recent negative tests, depending on vaccination status and the requirements of their final destinations.
Such gaps raise concern of open avenues for contagion.
Of the 61 people who tested positive “that number of people seems like a very high number to have this happen to,” said Andrew Pekosz, a public health researcher from Johns Hopkins University.
The omicron variant is likely to be found in some of those 61 passengers who tested positive, Dutch public health officials said Saturday.
The sequencing is still being performed by the Dutch agency for disease control and prevention. It was unclear how many passengers tested positive for the variant.
Those who tested positive for the coronavirus at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport on Friday have been transferred to quarantine hotels. Those who tested negative could continue their journey or, if the Netherlands was their final destination, were told to quarantine at home.
The government is also telling thousands of people who have returned from southern Africa in the past few days to get tested, even if they don’t have symptoms.
There is still relatively little known about omicron. It has mutations that scientists fear could make it more infectious and less susceptible to vaccines — although neither of those effects has yet to be established.
The numbers of confirmed cases outside southern Africa remain small, but there are worries that the virus had spread more widely before scientists discovered it.
“It would be irresponsible” not to be worried about the new variant, Roberto Speranza, health minister of Italy — the first European Union nation to block flights from southern Africa — told the Corriere della Sera newspaper Saturday.