Expatica news

Dutch allow more than half to leave ‘Covid hotel’

The Netherlands said Thursday more than half of the passengers quarantined at a hotel after testing positive following their arrival from South Africa can leave, but those with the Omicron variant must stay.

The passengers, who arrived on two KLM flights from South Africa last Friday and initially tested positive for Covid-19, tested negative during second tests taken from Monday onwards.

“They are free to continue with their journey,” Willem van den Oetelaar, spokesman for the local Public Health Services told AFP.

Initially 61 people tested positive for coronavirus after two flights arrived from Johannesburg and Cape Town on Friday — including 14 people with the new Omicron strain of the virus.

Van Oetelaar said 44 passengers remained in quarantine at a hotel a few kilometres (miles) away from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport by Wednesday “but more than half are now free to leave”.

He did not give exact numbers but added that those remaining passengers “including those with the Omicron variant” will remain in isolation at the hotel.

Some passengers who live in the Netherlands had also been allowed to quarantine at home.

The Ramada hotel first hit the news after Dutch border police arrested a couple who absconded from the building on Sunday evening, as they were about to take off on a flight bound for Spain.

They were then put into forced isolation at a facility in the northern Groningen province.

The couple from Spain and Portugal was released on Tuesday after one of them — who originally tested positive for Covid-19 on arrival from South Africa — was negative after a second test.

Dutch health authorities on Tuesday also said the Omicron variant was present in the Netherlands before the flights arrived from South Africa, in two samples from November 19 and 23.