A businessman trapped in a Hong Kong hotel where Asia’s first swine-flu patient was found spoke yesterday of escalating tensions among the guests who have been quarantined there for seven days.
The Hong Kong government took the radical step of sealing off the Metropark Hotel in the city’s Wanchai district on Friday night after confirming that a Mexican man who stayed there had the virus. The decision quarantined 240 guests and more than 100 staff.
Indian national Kevin Ireland, 45, said people had become agitated after first being told by staff that they would be kept in the hotel for only 24 hours and then learning from TV broadcasts that the quarantine period was a full week.
“This morning, there was a Korean gentleman, and he was way off the handle,” Ireland said from inside his hotel room. “He was screaming and shouting and throwing a tantrum. There is a young couple from the UK. She has been crying incessantly.”
“Then there is a South African couple with a 10-month-old baby and their grandmother. The wife was taken away for tests and they are really quite agitated,” he said.
Ireland, who runs a business called Indo-Spanish Marketing Services, said the atmosphere at the hotel changed dramatically in a short time as agitation among the guests rose.
“On Friday night, we were all laughing and joking and trying to make light of it,” he said. “That was when we thought it was only for 24 hours. Now it seems real, and we’ve all got jobs to do, lives to lead and responsibilities.”
The drama began as Ireland and two Spanish colleagues, visiting Hong Kong for a trade fair, tried to leave the hotel for dinner on Friday evening.
“Suddenly, we saw a lot of policemen and other people in protective gear in the lobby, and they said, ‘No, you can’t go out, and we advise you to put on protective face masks,’” he said.
“They weren’t letting people out, and they were keeping out people who wanted to come back in,” he said. “There were mutterings about swine flu. There was no clear information until much later.”
A sign in the lobby said guests would be kept in the hotel for 24 hours, Ireland said, but when he went to his room and switched on the television, he found out otherwise.
Tensions were fueled by the attitude of police in the hotel who were “brusque and standoffish,” he said.
“There are lots of people here from Spain and other countries who just don’t understand them,” he said. “They should be a little bit more gentle. At the end of the day, we just happened to be in the wrong place. They need to be a little bit more patient with people.”
Other concerns were also playing on his mind, he said.
“I haven’t told my daughters because why I don’t want to worry them,” he said of his seven-year-old and 12-year-old girls. “But one of my doctor friends told me to take it easy and not to fret. The problem is this was only supposed to be a short trip, and I didn’t bring books or enough to wear.”
That concern is shared by other guests, who may go to a help desk at the hotel where they can ask for necessities. Most people have been asking for fresh underwear, Ireland said.
“Today our rooms weren’t cleaned,” he said. “There is no room service. There is no change of linen, sheets or towels because they have no access to clean linen from outside.”
Asked what guests thought of the quarantine measure, Ireland said: “People think it is an overreaction. We have access to the Internet and news channels, and everyone is doing their own fact-finding.
“This swine flu is all over the place and it’s only in Mexico where it’s really severe, but nowhere else have they put people into isolation or quarantine like this,” he said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS