South Africans in Miami come home to quarantine
The KZN contingent will be quarantined at at Umhlanga Hotel.
REPATRIATED South African citizens are going to be quarantined at a hotel in Umhlanga.
*Sibongile Sithole, 27, a Durban resident is one of the 300 South Africans who had been repatriated from Miami in the USA on 14 April in a chartered South African Airways flight.
The USA has recorded the most coronavirus-related deaths in the whole world with 23 644 as of 14 April.
Sithole has been working as a cocktail mixer in Florida hotels and restaurants since 2017 for an agency that supplies foreign staff to the USA.
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“I (was) scared but it is not that bad, I am inside an apartment. I only went out to buy groceries and the streets are empty, there are like 20 people inside a shop plus everyone is wearing a mask,” she said.
The state of Florida has been one of the slowest places to issue stay-at-home orders, but Sithole said business in the hospitality industry had significantly slowed down since the beginning of March.
Sithole said the restaurant she worked at was now only doing take-aways.
Sithole, along with her compatriots had booked tickets to return home two weeks ago but tickets were cancelled when it was announced that the SA government was no longer allowing flights from the USA.
“Our employer and agency decided to contact the SA government to organise a chartered flight for all of us,” she said.
Sithole was due to return to SA next year.
She said while she missed home, she planned on returning to the USA once the pandemic is under control.
“I have mixed emotions about coming back,” she said. “I miss the vetkoek, Nandos, Chicken Licken wings, steam bread with beans, home cooked meals and normal meat. The meat here is weird.”
Like the Wuhan repatriates, the Miami cluster will be required to be quarantined for a minimum of 14 days.
The KwaZulu-Natal contingent will be quarantined at a hotel in Umhlanga and their stay will be co-ordinated by the Department of Health.
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