One quarantine after another
Evacuees to undergo another screening before given rooms in what’s, essentially, a medical jail
Imagine a rained-out vacation day at a motel somewhere in the country off a highway you can’t quite place.
You’re stuck inside. The kids are bored. You’re running out of things to do. By noon, everyone’s nerves are a little jangled. By dinner, you’re barely keeping the lid on a brewing sibling civil war.
By 10 p.m., you’ve found God again. You’re on your knees. You’re praying for a sunny dawn.
You’d do anything to get out of that room.
Now take that experience and multiply it by 14. That should give you some sense of what the 176 Canadians evacuated from Wuhan, China Thursday have in store for them now that they’ve landed in Canada Friday morning.
The first Canadian rescue plane to depart the mass quarantine zone in Wuhan, a sprawling metropolis about 800 km inland from Shanghai, took off, after several delays, Thursday afternoon EST, according to Canadian government officials.
On board were 176 passengers, including as many as 34 minors, who had all been stuck in the locked-down Hubei province, epicentre of the novel coronavirus, for weeks. Two hundred eleven passengers, mostly Canadian citizens, but also 12 permanent residents and six Chinese citizens with Canadians visas, were originally scheduled to depart Thursday. But that number shrank considerably as the day went on.
At a news conference Thursday afternoon, Foreign Affairs Minister FrancoisPhillippe Champagne said some passengers might have simply changed their minds. Other may have shown signs of illness and denied the right to board.
At the same conference, federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu laid out the extensive screening process each passenger had to undergo before being allowed on the plane.
“Chinese health authorities are screening travellers before they get to the airport and anyone who is ill will not be allowed to board the flight,” she said. “DND medical staff will also assess passengers, taking the temperature of each traveller and checking for symptoms of the coronavirus. In addition, DND staff are also assessing the medical status of each traveller to determine if they’re fit to fly.”
Once on board the plane, the passengers, decked out in blue medical masks, were assessed again by Canadian military doctors. Each passenger was given a health declaration to sign, and Hajdu said anyone showing symptoms of the illness would be quarantined on board.
The flight landed in Vancouver early Friday to refuel. After weeks of quarantine in the mega-city-turned-ghost town that is Wuhan, followed by a travel odyssey that lasted, in some cases, for days, the passengers are allowed back onto Canadian soil Friday morning at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, a huge Air Force facility about two hours east of Toronto.
There, they’ll undergo another screening in a quarantined hangar before being shown to their rooms in what is, essentially, a wellappointed medical jail.
The 176 evacuees are all being kept in quarantine at the Yukon Lodge, a hotel on the base, for 14 days. “Each traveller will have a room and families will be grouped together,” Hajdu said. “All bedrooms have complete bathrooms with a shower. Emergency management assistance teams from the province of Ontario will provide onsite primary care including social services and each traveller will also receive a daily health assessment.”
A mix of federal and provincial employees as well as officials from the Red Cross will be in charge of feeding and caring for the hotelbound passengers, Hajdu said. Some of them will be staying in the hotel, which has 290 rooms and has been otherwise completely cleared of guests. They’ll be providing food, clothing, diapers, formula, games and in some cases mental health supports.
“I think it’s important to remember that people have been through a very stressful time under quarantine,” Hajdu said. “I mean, the city (Wuhan) has completely shut down. People have not been able to come and go freely, even from their own homes.”
The Yukon Lodge itself, which is open to military personnel and others with ties to the base, has the look of a higher-end chain motel — better than a Howard Johnson, but maybe not quite a Hilton DoubleTree. Riley McEntee stayed there four years ago. “I don’t know if it’s the same as it was back then, but the accommodations were amazing,” he wrote in an email, “like a four star hotel. Very clean, very orderly, comfortable beds and a goodsized bathroom.”