Global travellers stranded

LAUREN Kennedy Brady landed in Johannesburg on Friday to a flurry of text messages and news alerts.

The Broadway veteran and North Carolina resident was headed home after 11 days touring Africa alongside her mother, daughter and niece – a long-delayed bucket list item for the foursome. They were at the first stop on what was supposed to be a multileg journey from Zambia to Raleigh. Everything was going smoothly.

But scanning her phone, Kennedy Brady, 47, learnt a new variant of the coronavirus had been detected in South Africa. Not long after, the family found themselves stranded, their reservation on the next flight cancelled amid the new restrictions.

“Until that moment, everything seemed fine. We hadn’t had any problems travelling around. Of course, there have been protocols … but that’s just the world we live in now,” Kennedy Brady said. “So for this thing to have happened within minutes – it was just like, ‘And stop’.”

The disruptions for Kennedy Brady and her family, as well as for so many others, come as various governments scrambled to place restrictions on travel, closing their borders to southern African countries amid concerns about the potentially dangerous variant, dubbed Omicron. The changes are having ripple effects for travellers.

They have been left stuck abroad, desperately trying to get home amid a string of cancellations, while others are scrapping plans to see loved ones in other countries – for many the latest in a series of pandemic-induced travel frustrations, coming only weeks after the US lifted its ban on visitors from 33 countries.

Travel medicine experts say while the restrictions may allow time to learn more about the variant’s dangers, the concerns leave international travellers to determine how much they’re willing to deal with.

“We felt like we’ve come out of this long, dark tunnel,” said Julian Harrison, the owner of Premier Tours, a Philadelphia-based travel agency that specialises in African tours. “And this has started all over again, basically.”

For many, the latest jolt to travel was a reminder of early pandemic days, when borders closed, airports shut down and flights were grounded overnight. In the aftermath of Omicron’s discovery, the travel bans by the EU, the US and other nations went into effect yesterday, even as African officials and some public health experts condemn the move.

Some countries are imposing new testing and quarantine requirements, sowing added confusion at a moment when many were just starting to feel confident travelling again.

“People are tired and they want it to be over,” said David Freedman, president-elect of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. “And I think we’re going to have to reach an equilibrium before very long.”

Sean Park-Ross had plans to return to South Africa and spend Christmas with his family and friends – and then he saw news of the variant. He travels all over for his work in software development, and is now in Mexico City, said he thought even if he could make it there, it might be a while before he could leave.

His family was “really looking forward to seeing me, spending some good Christmas time together”, ParkRoss said. He thought about his 5-yearold nephew and his parents, who are in their 70s.

“I haven’t seen them in ages because I’m all around the world,” he said. “It really sucks.”

South African officials have criticised the travel bans, describing them as a draconian measure that in effect punishes the nation for alerting the world to a new variant. Public health experts also note that by the time bans go into place, a highly transmissible variant like Omicron has most likely already spread across much of the globe.

In an address to the nation on Sunday night, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the “only thing that prohibition on travel will do is to further damage the economies of the affected countries and undermine their ability to respond, and also to recover from the pandemic”.

But authorities in the US and elsewhere defended the move, with President Joe Biden’s top coronavirus adviser, Anthony Fauci, telling NBC’s Meet the Press that the “positive effect is to get us better prepared, to rev up on the vaccination, to be really ready for something that may not actually be a big deal, but we want to make sure that we’re prepared for the worst”.

Freedman said “science is moving at lightning speed in a way that wouldn’t have been possible five or 10 years ago. We’re getting answers to some pretty complicated questions in a matter of weeks rather than several months”.

Still, it could be a few weeks before it’s known whether the vaccines work against this strain.

As news of the variant emerged, Kennedy Brady described a chaotic scene at the airport: massive lines at customer service counters, with waiting travellers all fretting about how they would get to their various destinations outside South Africa. People were jostling to beat the clock, to be the first to speak with someone.

“It felt panicky because there was just so much chatter around us,” she said, “and everybody was just like, ‘What are we going to do? What are we going to do?’”

That frustration was palpable for international travellers, many of whom had only recently regained enough a sense of security to go abroad again.

Johannesburg resident Ayesha Shaw said she “definitely thought we were over the biggest hurdle” after pandemic restrictions caused months of separation from her boyfriend, who lives in the US. She had a plane ticket to depart on Saturday to New York to see him, and watched the news on Friday with trepidation. Minutes after midnight on Saturday, she received an email from Turkish Airlines: The flight out of Johannesburg was cancelled.

“I was so tired at that point, so emotionally exhausted, I was like, ‘I’m going to bed’,” the 28-year-old recalled. “When I got up, the first thing I did was cry.”

Park-Ross in Mexico, said: “I go by the science and what the scientists say.” But he said: “I just hope they take the bans out as quickly as they put them in.”

Shaw expressed frustration at the travel restrictions, noting these were discouraged by the World Health Organization. She had followed precautions and been vaccinated. “It does feel that even if you do everything right, it’s kind of like you still are not able to do the things that you want to do,” she said.

Freedman acknowledged the panic that quickly emerged over the new variant is “very disruptive”. He said that like the flu virus, which evolves and requires new vaccines every winter, “we’re going to have to live with the virus and with mutations occurring”.

“We’re not going to be able to live like this forever, going into a panic every time there’s a mutation of the virus somewhere in the world,” he said.

Kennedy Brady and her family managed to find a hotel in Johannesburg, where they were holed up at the weekend, trying to avoid mingling with others out of concern about the variant. They were searching for other paths out of the country, with help from family back home. As US citizens, they are allowed to travel back, but are struggling to find a flight to get there.

For now, she is focusing on the positives: “We’re safe, we’re healthy, and we’re together.” |