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Transport of the positively tested passengers in Schipol
Photo: Laurens Bosch / EPA
According to reports from passengers, disturbing scenes took place on Saturday night at Amsterdam Airport Schipol.
The occupants of two machines that landed from South Africa were intercepted and tested because of the new Corona variant Omikron, which was first detected in their country of departure.
After hours it was clear that 61 of around 600 passengers are Corona-positive - the so-called Omicron variant is "likely" among them.
According to the reports, it took hours to even start testing.
The people on the plane were "taken off the tarmac to an isolated room where we waited four hours before being tested," said passenger Paula Zimmerman.
"Everyone on the plane was in there," he said, and he said little attention was paid to the rules of distance.
After waiting for hours, she finally received a negative result, but now has to spend five days in quarantine at home, said Zimmerman, who documented her night in videos on the short message service Twitter.
Her last video, published there shortly before 4:00 a.m.CET, showed a line of other passengers waiting for their tests while others slept on benches and on the floor.
“Unfortunately, the organization was terrible.
We have to learn from this for the future, ”Zimmerman tweeted.
Stephanie Nolen, health reporter for the New York Times, was also on board one of the planes.
She spoke of a "dystopia" on Twitter - the counterpart to positive utopia.
Passengers, including babies and toddlers, were crammed together to be tested, while "still 30 percent of people would not have worn a mask" - many "only over their mouth".
Authorities show their understanding
"We're just in this non-ventilated room at the twelfth hour and breathe in each other," wrote Nolen.
On Saturday morning she was able to continue her trip to Toronto, Canada.
“The test was negative.
At least today. "
At one point he felt like he was being captured, another passenger reported.
"There was no orientation, nobody knew what was going on," said 33-year-old Philippe.
"It was a very unsafe situation and people got very angry about it."
He was angry too, said Philippe.
"Two years after the outbreak of the pandemic, why do the authorities still have to worry about how to test an airplane load full of people arriving at Schiphol?"
"We understand that people are frustrated about it," said the Dutch health authority GGD about the long waiting times for the test results. “They have just come back from a long journey and assume that they will soon be home.” Instead, they “were confronted with the unprecedented situation in the Netherlands, that they are being tested at Schiphol and then for that Have to wait for the result «.
The 61 passengers who tested positive are now waiting in a quarantine hotel near the airport to hear whether they have been infected with the new Omikron variant.
The National Institute for Public Health (RIVM) assumes, according to its own information: "The Omikron variant has probably been found in some people tested." Further analyzes would be carried out in order to finally determine this.
sbo / AFP
