How 2 Flights To Europe May Have Been 'Explosive Bombs', Spurred Spread Of Omicron Variant

It was business as usual at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, South Africa on November 26. Bustling queues, passengers armed with paperwork, and diligent check-in agents tried to put their customers on flights.

The same day hundreds of passengers travelled from South Africa to Amsterdam on flight KL592. But while the flight was en route, and the passengers slept or watched their screens, everything changed on the ground.

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Panic over new variant spread

Panic about the new omicron variant that had been discovered in southern Africa prompted countries to close their borders. The arrivals descended into a new post-omicron reality, and it was a hellish one, with hours spent breathing stale air as their planes sat on the tarmac, then fighting exhaustion in crammed waiting rooms, awaiting swab results in close quarters with fellow travelers who would turn out to be infected with the new and possibly more dangerous variant.

¡°We were in the same place, the same room,¡± said one passenger, Jan Mezek, 39, a laboratory technician whose company services swab-test machines and who was returning from a two-week work trip to his home in Prague. ¡°I felt like a pig in a pen,¡± he said, adding ¡°they were completely spreading the virus around us.¡±

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Of over 60 people who had COVID, 14 had omicron

Of the more than 60 people on that and another KLM flight from South Africa who tested positive for the virus, at least 14 had omicron, according to Dutch officials. The Dutch authorities have quarantined them ¡ª and arrested a couple who had tried to break out and fly to Spain ¡ª while requiring the hundreds who showed negative results from the PCR test administered at the airport to go home or board connecting flights to their final destinations.

¡°They went around the world, who knows where,¡± said Fabrizio Pregliasco, a prominent Italian virologist at the University of Milan. He said that all the passengers should have been quarantined or isolated and monitored closely for seven to 10 days, especially because they could have caught the virus on the flight and tested negative as it incubated. ¡°If this variant is very contagious, this flight is an explosive bomb,¡± Pregliasco said.

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Confusion over rules

The flights, like the cruise ships of the early pandemic, have prompted fears of superspreader events and raised concerns about lessons unlearned.

The rules for any given passenger on any given flight are generally determined by that person¡¯s final destination country, said Karen Gr¨¦pin, a professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong, who has been studying travel rules during the pandemic.

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Countries and often airlines have their own testing requirements, and transferring passengers sometimes have to meet still different criteria. The result is that a passenger in an aisle seat may have been tested differently than the passenger across the arm rest. But all that confusion and agita may soon seem like the good old days, when travel, if confounding, was at least possible.

What happened after landing

On Tuesday, KLM, the airline which operated the two flights Friday from South Africa, apologized to passengers. But Marjan Rozemeijer, a spokeswoman for the company, suggested it had been just as caught off guard by the variant as anyone.

Upon the landing of the flights at Schiphol Airport, she said, the company was ¡°asked by the Dutch government to park our aircrafts in a particular location so that all passengers could be tested,¡± and added that the airport and the Dutch public health authorities had organized and performed the testing.

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A spokesman for the Dutch public health service, by contrast, said it had gone above and beyond in its efforts and saw nothing wrong with letting the passengers who had tested negative for the virus proceed on their journeys.

But the Dutch health ministry said even the passengers who tested negative should be in quarantine, and van den Oetelaar said the agency had taken the extraordinary step, usually reserved for reaching out to passengers in the vicinity of an infected person, of trying to contact everyone who was on the planes and urging them to quarantine and notify their local health authorities.

World shut out South Africa

The World Health Organization, which has been closely monitoring the new variant, said that international contact tracing was up to countries where cases were detected and fell outside its purview. After the emergence of the omicron variant in Africa last week, the United States and the European Union and other nations banned flights from southern Africa.

COVID-19 new variant omicron

Israel and Morocco slammed their doors on the world. Australia, Japan and other countries postponed opening up and joined China, which has adopted a fortress mentality as it seeks to vanquish the virus at home altogether.

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