Omicron hotel guests left irate
There is one sub-genre of pandemic news reporting I shall not miss when all this is over. That is the wailing of global airline passengers forced to quarantine in airport hotels as their COVID-19 test results are assessed.
For the hotel is always insufficient in so many ways. You would think travellers returning to Canada, a rules-based nation, would be grateful for careful testing, tracing and tracking at the airport where people come from places around the world with different variants, vaccination rates, attitudes to vaccination and rules for entry and exit.
And no smart person would be travelling at the moment except in cases of exigency.
But these travellers are seething. As one South African-born couple, Lennard and Charlotte Skead, told the CBC, after returning to Canada when Omicron popped up, they felt “criminalized.” They couldn’t get flights and were repeatedly inconvenienced, despite testing negative. “It has made us feel as though we are not welcome in our own country and that we are carrying some kind of terrible disease that’s going to be the end of the world.”
Really. I wonder who would have possibly thought that.
Other victims keened. Some told the Globe and Mail of being placed in hotels for days without access to laundry or enjoyable food, an almost Talibanist level of suffering.
Some families with children were given the wrong-sized diapers and weren’t served baby food. Imagine. Presumably they mashed it up themselves or possibly pre-chewed it, you know, the way birds do.
Mary Ellen Havlik, a “humanitarian consultant” in Nigeria, returned to Canada and was frightened to see the quarantine hotel lobby encased in plastic. “It was just dystopian,” she said. Did she expect parachute silk?
She was without luggage for four days. “People were starting to get really belligerent. Some people were throwing their food out the window.” I doubt a Nigerian visitor would have been so rude.
One man returning from South Africa complained his food was cold. Sara Sagaii, briefly quarantined in Vancouver after returning from Egypt via Istanbul, told the Globe she was served a “basically rotten salad” and had to wear the same clothes for three days.
I’ll interject. I live in a house with food and dishes and things. My husband’s salads have ingredients. “Oh, toasted sesame dressing, possibly orange juice, a citrus olive oil. I like microgreens.” Huh? “Arugula and pea shoots.” This is the salad Sagaii wants.
When I make salad, you could call it vegetable drawer scrapings a la Heather. This is the salad Sagaii got. Yet my family claims to love every bite (the bites are silent, aging carrots gone inexplicably soft). Take that approach.
When I hear hotel laundry, I think of John Candy and Steve Martin in the movie “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” after days on the road in rural America trying to get home for Thanksgiving, pleading for the world’s worst single-bed motel room.
“Have mercy,” Martin begs the desk clerk. “I’ve been wearing the same underwear since Tuesday.” Candy leans in. “I can vouch for that.”
Can reeking Canadians not wash their underlayers in a hotel sink? Where is our drive, our self-respect, our hand soap?
I think of British actor Richard E. Grant quarantined in a Gatwick Holiday Inn — perhaps he had “gone on holiday by mistake” — complaining about a packaged tuna and cucumber sandwich, a sausage casserole and fish and chips. Too pricey, he said.
“£228 a day to receive three meals of this very poor standard in a supposed four-star Holiday Inn Hotel beggars belief,” he said on Twitter video without cracking a smile. The relevant government minister responded, saying it was hardly responsible for the state of Grant’s fish and chips on a Friday night.
I suspect Ottawa feels exactly the same.