COVID-19: Gambia hunts for 14 quarantined escapees

Authorities in Gambia on Friday begun a hunt for 14 people who broke out of a hotel in Banjul where they had been quarantined for COVID-19.

The group was among 32 passengers who arrived from the United Kingdom on Wednesday.

“Those people who fled, we are following them and we are getting information. Because the beauty of the whole thing is, we’ve got their details, we’ve got their telephone numbers, some of them we’ve got their addresses, so you can see that makes life easy for us. Some of them we are able to track them. So we are tracking them and we will get them’‘, said Modou Njie, Director of Health Promotion and Education

Gambia’s Director of Health Promotion and Education said the escapees complained of the size of their hotel rooms.

“They also complain about the room size, that’s a typical hotel room size. But because of the fact that they just dont want to stay there, they dont want to be quarantined and that was why they are making all of these allegations on the Minister of Health”, he added.

Gambia recorded its first case of the coronavirus on Tuesday from a woman who flew in from the United Kingdom.

On that same day President Adama Barrow closed schools and placed arrivals from worst hit nations in quarantine as some measures to curtail spread of the virus.

AFP