Passengers arriving exhausted from long haul overseas trips are increasingly finding they have to board yet another flight after landing to take them to an airport where hotel rooms are available for mandatory self-quarantine.

The government requires all travelers arriving from countries and regions where the COVID-19 Omicron variant is raging to self-isolate at facilities it secured for that purpose. New arrivals are obliged to remain behind locked doors for the first three to 10 days of the two-week quarantine period.

A Japanese woman in her 50s who works for a Japanese-affiliated company in Europe arrived at Narita Airport following a stopover in Helsinki shortly after 11 a.m. on Dec. 12. She was traveling alone.

“We don’t have any hotels available (for self-quarantine) near Narita, so you will need to go to Kansai Airport,” a man who appeared to be an airport quarantine officer told the passengers.

“What? You’ve got to be kidding?” the woman thought as she sat with other passengers while waiting the results of a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test she took upon arrival.

She said that when other passengers asked what measures were in place to get them back to Narita, the official replied that they could take a government-chartered flight they would be using to reach Kansai Airport if they tested negative for the coronavirus during the quarantine period.

The woman had temporarily returned to Japan to spend the year-end and New Year holidays with her parents at their home in Tokyo.

She was asked to self-isolate for six days and ushered into a waiting room at Narita Airport where she learned that more than 20 of the roughly 60 passengers on the same flight she took also had to travel to Kansai Airport to self-quarantine.

“We couldn’t raise our voices (due to rules on preventing the spread of infection),” the woman recalled. “I think we all had difficulty grasping the situation.”

About 90 passengers, including the woman and those who arrived at Narita on a separate flight, boarded a chartered flight shortly after 8 p.m. and landed at Kansai Airport about an hour later.

When the woman and 20 other passengers boarded the bus waiting for them, they were told they were being driven to an accommodation facility some distance from the airport.

They arrived at their lodgings about 40 minutes later. It turned out they were in Osaka, which the woman learned only after asking a staff member of the facility where she was.

The woman entered her hotel room at 11 p.m., 12 hours after arriving at Narita Airport.

“I was at a loss over what to do and exhausted that day,” she said. “It must have been a hard day for elderly passengers and those feeling unwell or with children.”

She said staff who steered the passengers to the chartered flight and the bus appeared not to have been fully briefed on the situation.

“It felt like the government had not provided anything like a proper explanation right from the start,” she said.

CLOSE CONTACT ISSUE

A graduate student who spent three days in quarantine at a hotel near Tokyo’s Haneda Airport after his arrival there from New York on Dec. 6 received a phone call while he was relaxing with his family at his home in Kyoto on the evening of Dec. 10.

“You came into close contact with a patient infected with the Omicron variant,” a Kyoto city official told the man over the phone. “You need to self-quarantine.”

The 27-year-old man felt put out as he had already complied with quarantine requirements under the government’s border control measures because one passenger on the same flight had tested positive for the virus upon arrival.

The student is now self-isolating at a hotel in Kyoto as instructed by the city official.

“The authorities should have isolated us at the airport until they could determine if the infected passenger on the same flight as us had the variant,” he said. “I ended up causing problems and anxiety for my family.”

FURTHER SHORTAGES IN CARDS?

As of Dec. 14, some passengers arriving at Narita Airport from nations and territories with surging cases of the Omicron variant had to make onward journeys to as far away as Sendai, Chubu, Kansai and Fukuoka airports to self-quarantine, according to government officials.

As of Dec. 13, the health ministry had secured about 13,000 rooms, including those at facilities near the four airports, to isolate travelers.

But a portion of those rooms inevitably will have to be set aside for patients with the Omicron variant to recuperate if it starts to spread.

(This article was written by Ryo Miyazaki, Kazuhiko Matsunaga and Kai Ichino.)