First Paula Zimmerman Stumbled upon news of a disturbing, new coronavirus variant while manipulating her phone scroll in the departures lounge at Cape Town International Airport on November 25, “No name, and we knew nothing about it being more or less contagious,” she recalls. Zimmerman turned to her husband and said that the couple was lucky to be on a flight from South Africa to the Netherlands, due to a plane crash at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport the next morning, November 26. The flight went smoothly. share and when night falls. Zimmerman day and her passengers were preparing for a weekend getaway in the Netherlands. KLM Flight KL598 from Cape Town to Amsterdam landed at 10:35 a.m. on November 26, 20 minutes ahead of schedule.
But instead of going to its normal gate, the plane took a different route. “They drove us to a remote part of the airport,” said Paul Rebel, a businessman who was also on the flight and had traveled to the Netherlands for his mother’s funeral. The pilot’s voice came over the plane’s speakers: No one was allowed to get off the plane, because the Dutch government had imposed a travel ban on South Africa. The ban will go into effect at noon that day — in less than 90 minutes. Flight KL598 is stuck in a strange, dangling variant.
Rebel said: “I think they purposely kept us on the plane until after 12, then dropped us off at the airport. A spokesman for KLM said the airline had no choice but to comply with the rules set forth by the Dutch government and GGDDutch health service. A spokesperson said: “Passengers are not allowed to disembark without prior permission from the Dutch government and GGD. “The only thing we can do is comply and retain passengers.”
Flight KL598 and another, flight KL592 from Johannesburg to Schiphol, flew over an invisible wall. As Zimmerman, Rebel and their companions were flying north to the Netherlands, South African health authorities alerted the world to a potentially dangerous new variant — one that we all know. currently known as Omicron. And in response, much of the world closed its borders – inadvertently leaving 624 people stranded on the runway. While flying over Europe, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, pull suggestion an “emergency brake to stop air travel” from southern Africa into Europe. Then two planes landed.
It may have a name now, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about Omicron. Even so, much of the world, appalled at the potential for a more contagious variant that might shy away from a vaccine, quickly tried to stop it from spreading. The European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States have imposed travel bans on several South African countries. Israel and Japan have closed their borders to all foreigners. Governments and scientists are still waiting to see what Omicron does to our planet and population.
“I was a bit shocked at first because I thought it had to be terrorism-related,” Zimmerman said. “The captain explained that it was about this new variant and the government did not want us to enter the water. Then I thought, ‘Well, you know, that’s going to be fine. I guess.’ They said it would take about half an hour, and we would probably get off the bus and go check it out.”
