A South African who spent 14 days at a Hong Kong government quarantine site despite testing negative for Covid-19 has described the experience as “horrific and traumatic”.
This comes as Hong Kong health officials have vowed to continue sending returning nationals from countries including South Africa, Pakistan, India and Nepal to a compulsory quarantine period at government facilities.
Director of a wildlife conservation NGO Vega Hall-Martin Embree, her husband and their two-year-old son were sent to the quarantine site on arrival in Hong Kong.
Embree claimed nationals from countries with high infection rates such as the UK and the US were allowed to self-quarantine at home after entering Hong Kong, while those from African countries were quarantined in “unhygienic” state-owned facilities.
She said 10 other South Africans who were part of the group that arrived with them on May 14, on a flight via Doha were also sent to the quarantine site although they also tested negative for Covid-19.
“Anyone arriving from South Africa or having started their travel from South Africa were sent to the quarantine sites. It was mostly young families, some with babies,” Embree said.
Embree and her Canadian husband Colin Embree, who heads up NBC Financial Markets in Hong Kong, had been living in Hong Kong for more than five years.
They were visiting Vega’s family in South Africa when the country went into lockdown, and spent seven weeks here before returning to Hong Kong.
But despite South Africa having one of the strictest lockdowns, Hong Kong health authorities said in general, people coming back from countries/areas with lockdowns might “be having a higher risk because they had been stranded in an area outside Hong Kong for a long period and hence had a high risk of infection. “They were released at midnight on May 27, and had been tested for a second time and the results were negative again,” she added.
Hong Kong health officials said since late last month Hong Kong residents, who were earlier stranded in “areas of unknown epidemic situation”, had started returning to the country.
The countries included Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and South Africa.
“The quarantine arrangement targets the risk of infection but not the ethnicity of the returnees. We will closely monitor the situation locally and overseas, and will review the arrangement as we gain more understanding about the test findings of recent returnees from these countries,” the officials said.
South Africa’s Consul General in Hong Kong, Mbulelo Ntshinga, confirmed that the consulate sent a letter to the Hong Kong government requesting them to reconsider the quarantine of South Africans in the government facilities and afford them a treatment similar to Americans and Europeans.
The Department of International Relations and Co-operation said it could only take up the matter once it was brought to its attention.
IOL
