I made it back to Canada from southern Africa just ahead of the Omicron travel ban. No one knew what to do with me

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/11/2021 (1026 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This is mildly embarrassing to admit publicly, but as soon as I got off the plane in Calgary, I power-walked straight into Tim Hortons.

Even worse, I snapped a picture of my large coffee — three milks, no sugar — and posted it to my Instagram stories with a pink flashing “Home Sweet Home” banner.

In my defence, I’d gotten little sleep during the journey back from a three-week reporting trip to southern Africa, and coffees outside of North America are very, very small.

A former colleague responded to my post immediately.

“Welcome back! Made it home just before the flight bans.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Unbeknownst to me, while my plane had likely been somewhere over Europe, South African officials had announced the discovery of a new variant of the coronavirus, since dubbed Omicron, and were racing to find out its implications.

As I’d soon learn, I had slid in under the wire, ahead of sweeping border closures ordered by politicians frightened at the prospect of an upgraded version of the virus.

It bears repeating that there are still a lot of questions about Omicron that need to be answered, but, at the very least, the variant has raised the spectre of a punishing new wave of COVID-19.

It’s also showed that, 20 months into this thing, we’re very much not in it together.

If anything, Omicron has finally forced the world to pay attention to what global health advocates have been shouting from the rooftops for a year — that if vaccines aren’t shared, the new variants that will emerge sure will be.

It’s possible to draw a straight line between the emergence of new variants and the swaths of people around the world who are unvaccinated — each infected person allowing the virus a fresh chance to mutate. It was Canada and other wealthy countries that bought up most of the global vaccine supply, and are only now starting to mull giving some of that away.

In recent weeks, I’ve made my way across Angola, South Africa and Namibia as part of a forthcoming project on global vaccine equity that was funded by the R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship, a Canadian media bursary in memory of a longtime foreign reporter who believed strongly in the need for reporters to bear witness to what was going on in the world.

Perhaps the most significant border I crossed in coming home was the one between the unvaccinated world and the vaccinated. About six per cent of Africans are fully vaccinated, compared to about 75 per cent of Canadians. If Omicron turns out to be more spreadable or more virulent — again, not things we currently know — it could prompt a new storm in Canada, but a tsunami elsewhere.

The calls for border restrictions have come from familiar corners, including Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Ontario’s Doug Ford, who called for even those arriving before a ban kicked in to be tested and quarantined.

On Friday, the federal government announced the borders would indeed be closed to travellers from a handful of southern African countries.

In the hours after the new rules were announced, I called the provincial health hotline in Alberta, where I live, which then referred me to the helpline for ArriveCAN, the app travellers must now use to vouch for their vaccination or testing status when entering the country.

Neither person that answered had any idea what I was talking about. “Can you please explain to me what you heard about Africa?” asked one well-meaning staffer. I was advised to send an email to an address from which I received no response.

Things got clearer over the weekend. On Saturday, two days after I arrived, I got a call from a federal screener who told me I’d been randomly selected for the regular COVID traveller screening program, unrelated to South Africa, she said, and wanted to know if I’d done my first test.

The only problem was that no one had told me this at the airport, so my take-home tests would have to be mailed to me first.

She was familiar with the new South African policies, however, and said it was recommended I quarantine but that, as a vaccinated traveller, it wasn’t mandatory for me.

That evening, I got an email from the province, which recommended I quarantine and get a PCR test, which, thankfully, I was able to do at a Calgary drive-in site within hours. The province also offered to send me some rapid antigen tests, so I could continue to test myself while I waited out the clock on isolation.

It wasn’t until Monday, four days after I arrived back, that I was called to say that quarantine for the remaining 10 days was now mandatory.

To state the obvious, international travel, even when there isn’t a global pandemic, is a luxury.

It’s a mark of privilege that not only was I able to evade border closures — check New York Times global health reporter Stephanie Nolen’s Twitter feed for a look at what happened when she left the continent only slightly later — but as I’m typing this, I’m wearing fuzzy socks in my home office, while the new virus variant spins dark clouds above millions of unvaccinated people.

Back in South Africa, the general feeling on social media is that the country has been scapegoated for doing its job in detecting a variant while work continues to determine where it originated, including, possibly, in another country.

Calling from Cape Town at 10 p.m. local time after a hectic weekend that felt like a time warp back to early days of the pandemic, Kate Stegeman sounded tired Monday.

Stegeman does advocacy and policy for the Médecins Sans Frontières campaign for access to vaccines and drugs in Africa and says that while much of the world worries, South Africa’s many qualified scientists are racing to find out what the variant means.

“We need to wait to get more data. We need to wait for COVAX to deliver on their doses. We need to wait for doses to be redistributed. We need to wait for intellectual property to be waived. We need to wait for technology to be transferred,” she says, and sighs. “It’s been incredibly tiring.

“It’s hard not to feel a little bit disillusioned at times.”

The clip currently being widely shared on South African social media and in WhatsApp groups is a BBC interview with Ayoade Alakija, co-chair of the Africa Vaccine Alliance.

Her hands clasped beneath her chin, Alakija doesn’t mince words about what many people see as the unfairness of the travel bans.

“Had the first SARS COV-2 virus, the one that was first identified in China last year, originated in Africa, it is now clear that the world would have locked us away and thrown away the key.”

Despite Canada’s efforts, Omicron’s arrival here was confirmed shortly after I got off the plane.

Now a world divided between those with vaccine protection and those without wait to see what happens next.

Alex Boyd is a Calgary-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @alex_n_boyd