12-hour ordeal for passengers landing at Bengaluru from France

“We are finally out of the hell hole, they took about 12 hours to figure out how to screen the passengers. This is the government we have …” tweeted Sneha Bali a little after Noon on Sunday. She was among the passengers who had flown into the city from France late on Saturday evening. In a series of tweets, she accused officials of herding passengers together and not caring much for sanitation and hygiene.

This is the ordeal she and fellow passengers went through, in her own words:

The hospital is shambles, no water no bathroom…the wards stink of urine. We were detained without any clarity, we are awake the entire time, walking outside the hospital. No food has been provided, no officials are here at 7:09 am (Sunday). Nobody is taking responsibility.

While we understand the seriousness of pandemic at hand, we are quite clueless as how quarantine will work when 60 people are put in a suffocating location waiting for symptoms to show up?

Tweeting photographs of the space where passengers were ‘quarantined’ as well as the toilet available, she went on to say, “This is the state of quarantine. People are generally sick due to lack of sleep, lack of provision to go to the bathroom, no proper food for the last nine hours, the last meal we had was in the flight…

The quarantine situation is very bad with everyone walking about with no masks, no sanitiser, bathrooms are so bad and we are supposed to wash hands as often as possible ! We haven’t been to the loo since the past 10 hours.

A little before Noon on Sunday, she again tweeted, “ It’s been easily two hours since officials are discussing and planning on screening. While we really appreciate them working on a Sunday, we would really like to understand how this is supposed to be a quarantine…”

Shortly thereafter, she and the other passengers were apparently allowed to leave.