Over 160 South African cruise ship workers are breathing a sigh of relief after their appeals to be moved to a cleaner COVID-19 quarantine facility in Durban, in KwaZulu-Natal, have been answered.
The group arrived in the city last week and was placed in a quarantine facility in a hotel in the Durban CBD.
This is the protocol for South Africans arriving from outside the country during the lockdown.
The crew was taken to the Coastlands Hotel’s Doctor Pixley KaSeme Street branch, close to Durban’s beachfront. This is one of the province’s quarantine facilities. But soon after their arrival at the facility, they reported that the hotel was not suitable to live in. They complained of dirty rooms, dead cockroaches and torn mattresses.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, some crew members say they believe that health protocols were not followed at their original quarantine site.
“It was a nightmare, there was like people who literally lived there with children running around barefoot without masks. When we got there, there was no food, we had to go out and get something to eat by ourselves,” says one crew member.
Another says: “Once we went into the hotel at first it didn’t look bad, but once we reached our rooms a lot of people found cockroaches everywhere. It was extremely dirty, there were stains on the walls.”
“The protocols were not followed at all, we are supposed to do two temperatures a day, there need to be two nurses and a doctor on call on the facility which didn’t happen. We only saw the nurses on the second day when we started to make a big fuss about everything and started taking on the management of the hotel,” adds another member.
Pictures show squalid living quarters. Many crew members allege that the hotel was operating as a lodging facility.
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Tim Brauteseth MP
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In the video below, KZN refutes hazard claims at one of its quarantine facilities in Durban:
However, the KwaZulu-Natal Health Department is disputing claims that the quarantine site is not suitable for use.
Provincial Health MEC Nomagugu Simelane-Zulu says all quarantine sites have been inspected. Simelane-Zulu has criticised the crew members, saying they were unruly.
“Coastlands is a very clean hotel, by the way. It’s a facility we have been utilising for quarantine for the past three months, at least now. The fact that there have been challenges that were coming from just this particular group is of serious concern. I must indicate that this particular group brought in alcohol with it from the vessel that they were travelling in. The same group did not adhere to the quarantine rules, they were coming in and out of the facility as they deemed fit.”
The crew has been relocated to another facility owned by the group north of Durban. The Coastlands Hotel Group says its management will comment at this stage.
This group is not the first to have criticised goverment’s quarantine sites.
In May, a group of South Africans repatriated from Mozambique threatened the Mpumalanga government with legal action, saying it had not been tested for COVID-19 and was quarantined in unhygienic conditions.
