Mom from recent UK flight skips quarantine, leaving child behind

THE health ministry is now assessing what went wrong at a quarantine facility in St Ann, after a mother walked away, leaving her COVID-19-positive child behind.

The woman, part of a group that recently arrived from the UK, was later found and is now being detained at the facility, according to Minister of Health and Wellness Dr Christopher Tufton.

“What we will do is determine where the breach occurred and how to deal with it going forward,” the minister told the Jamaica Observer on Thursday. “It’s not the first time that we have had these circumstances, and we try to tighten up security and so on when we do have them. Every circumstance is assessed and a response generated around the particular situation.”

There have been previous reports of individuals leaving the premises to which they have been quarantined, but this is the first report of a child being left behind.

Medical staff were shocked when the woman left without permission on Wednesday, Tufton said.

“I’m sure the child was supervised by the public health team, but the fact that [the mother] left unannounced would certainly have been a surprise to the staff. And her action was alarming, given that she has a child,” he said. “[She] has been tending to the child, so that makes her vulnerable as well.”

On Monday, 301 passengers from Britain were quarantined and tested for COVID-19 as concerns sky-rocketed globally about a new strain of the virus found in the UK. On Wednesday, the health ministry announced that 20 of the tests had come back positive. Samples have now been sent abroad to determine if any are of the new strain.

Believed to have originated in Kent, the new strain is said to be more than 50 per cent more transmissible than the one that up to Thursday had infected almost 79 million people and taken the lives of almost two million people around the world. In Jamaica, more than 12,000 have been infected, while 290 have died.

Monday’s flight from the UK was one of the last allowed in, ahead of a two-week ban on flights from Britain. That was the day Jamaica joined a number of other countries around the world in halting passenger arrivals from the UK in a bid to minimise their local populations’ exposure to the new strain. Flights already en route were allowed to land, while others scheduled for future dates were cancelled. A close eye is now being kept on all recent arrivals from the UK.

Incoming passengers are routinely asked to quarantine for 14 days, but there is anecdotal evidence that many do not comply.

“Some people breach the quarantine arrangement, yes, and when they are apprehended they can be charged or placed in a State facility of one form or another, so we do take action,” Tufton said Thursday. “Truth is, we don’t have the manpower to do 24-hour monitoring, so I am sure that some get away with it. But we do the follow-ups, and whenever we have reason to hold anyone we hold them; and we hold them accountable.”