For 30-year-old Srinithin Jayabal, last week was nothing short of a nightmare. The software developer who landed in Rome on 26 February had spent a good two weeks in Italy before the country suddenly shut down in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
The young techie, who runs his own business in Coimbatore, travels to Italy every year to meet clients. This time, he realised, he was trapped, with rules set by India making him ineligible to board a flight back home.
"Rome shut down on 9 March and it became clear that I had to immediately leave before airports, too, stopped functioning. I was anyway supposed to leave on 15 March, and so I advanced my ticket to 10 March. I cleared immigration and was about to board the flight when the Emirates crew stopped me," he says.
“They said I can’t board a flight, according to the Indian government’s rules, without a COVID-19 negative certificate,” he adds.
However, this proved a near-impossible ask for Srinithin. “I was trying to get this certificate, but hospitals in Italy refuse to test you unless you are showing any symptoms, because of the already large number of patients being treated," he said.
The death toll from Italy's coronavirus outbreak is 1,441 as of Saturday, 14 March, and the country has reported a total of 21,157 cases.
Italy is currently the worst-affected country in Europe and second only to China in the world.
"I was not showing any symptoms and it was impossible for me to leave Italy. No amount of money was enough to get me out of there, and the mental agony of being unable to leave was horrible," he says, "And the longer you were there, the more you risked being exposed to the infection."
For Srinithin, who has always seen Rome as a city that never sleeps, the near-empty roads and empty tourist spots were startling. He even contacted the External Affairs Ministry through Twitter looking for some help and guidance as he was unable to reach the Indian mission in Rome. Set upon somehow making it back to India safe, he contacted an Indian-origin priest he knew in the Vatican.
"He told me that we could leave from a neighbouring country, from where flights to India were leaving without any restriction as there were no COVID-19 cases there," he says.
“So the priest and I went to this country, and then to New Delhi, before I took another flight to Coimbatore and reached on Saturday morning,” Srinithin said.
He self-declared his travel history to Italy when he landed in India and went through the screening process. He has no symptoms of COVID-19.
The techie is unwilling to disclose the name of the country he took the flight from as he believes others shouldn't be stopped from doing the same. From the time he landed, Srinithin has quarantined himself and plans to continue for a minimum of 14 days as a precautionary measure.
"I was just lucky that I made it out. I waited for a few days hoping they would remove the restrictions but while other nationals including Americans, Russians and Britishers could return home, Indians alone were stranded," he says, "This has been a real shock to me. They could have brought us back to India and put us in quarantine if they suspected us of having the infection. When there is no possibility of us getting this certificate, what is the point in giving us no way out?"
(This article has been republished in arrangement with The News Minute)
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