By Amanda Gillies
Air New Zealand passengers at Auckland International Airport were left furious and frustrated as a few sniffles on board became a full-scale health drama.
Ambulances were called, hospitals placed on standby, and the flight was effectively quarantined.
It was, in the words of one health official, an “over-reaction”.
Three hours after her daughter landed, Rhonda Borgas was finally reunited with her daughter Lauren.
“We just got told once we landed that we were probably going to go into quarantine and we sat on the tarmac for what - almost one and a half hours - without any information. It was really terrible. We didn't get any water, nothing. We were just sweating to death.”
The holdup was because 60 Japanese students on board had flu-like symptoms. Some had coughed through the night.
“It was a bit of a shambles to be honest,” says passenger David Turner.
“The captain kept coming on the radio and saying ‘we are sorry we don't know where the ambulance is. For some reason the air bridge isn't docking and no one is coming on’. The information was pretty poor.”
Eventually, fully-kitted out medical staff boarded the plane to test the 17-year-old’s. Ambulances waited nearby, Auckland hospitals were put on standby.
Around 11am passengers finally disembarked but only as far as a holding room.
“That was probably the worse thing - for a while a lot of the students were sitting in the room with us,” says Mr Turner. “And I said ‘I’m not comfortable being in the same room as these students’. And they said ‘you have already been on the plane with them for 10 hours. What are you worried about’.”
Mr Turner missed his flight to Wellington.
All the students and their teachers had been vaccinated in November - and were finally cleared by health officials.
Let's Homestay, the Tauranga company hosting the students, says the response was over-the-top.
“There are a couple with a few sniffles [but] they have just come from a winter in Japan - it's kind of expected,” says Stuart Cundy from Let's Homestay. “It has been exaggerated a bit. There were other passengers on the plane coughing and spluttering.”
Dr Richard Hoskins from Auckland Regional Public Health says the response was an “over-reaction”.
“Yes in hindsight you would classify this as an over-reaction, but we had a large group of people travelling into the country that we were notified of in good time, and we had to take it seriously until we knew it wasn't a significant new illness for New Zealand.”
It did give the students something to write home about.
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