Coronavirus: Couple arrested on plane after fleeing ‘Hotel Omicron’ quarantine in Netherlands
- The wife, Carolina Pimenta, was one of 61 travellers who tested positive for Covid-19, though it is not known if she had caught the new strain
- Border police caught up with the couple just before take-off, and they were taken off the flight ‘with much fuss and screaming’, Pimenta said
Dutch military police arrested a husband and wife on Sunday who had left a hotel where they were being quarantined after testing positive for Covid-19 and boarded a plane to fly home to Spain.
A spokeswoman for the local security authority that covers Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport said on Monday that an investigation was under way into whether the couple had committed a crime and should be prosecuted.
“Quarantine is not obligatory, but we assume people will act responsibly,” spokeswoman Petra Faber said. “But there was a couple that wanted to go home and they tried to fly home. The Royal Marechaussee took them off the plane and handed them back to the local health authority.”
There is little outward sign that the boxy, concrete Ramada hotel near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is home to the world’s biggest confirmed cluster of cases of the new Omicron variant.
The clientele is usually passengers whose flights are late or conference attendees, said Dicky, an experienced local taxi driver who also dubbed it the “Coronahotel”.
No police presence is visible in front of the hotel, and the only sign of any security are two guards who politely ask journalists to stop filming, without success.
In this country which prides itself on its respect for personal freedoms, the dozens of people quarantined here are in theory policed only by individual responsibility.
Dutch authorities transferred them here after finding 61 people with coronavirus among 624 travellers on two KLM flights from South Africa, where the new strain was first detected. Fourteen are now confirmed to have the Omicron strain.