More on Covid-19

WASHINGTON: Darpan Sharma reached San Francisco airport with 130 fellow Indians – none of them showing any symptoms of the coronavirus — to board the charter flight to India when word came through that they wouldn’t be going.New Delhi was not going to accept them before they had been quarantined for two weeks and shown as Covid-19 negative before boarding any flight that would land in India. In California, US authorities did have test kits or quarantine facilities in place. So it was back to the Grand Princess for 131 Indians, most of them crew members of the cruiseliner that was the center of world attention in the early days of the coronavirus, and now forgotten and chugging around the San Francisco Bay after disgorging all its 3500 international passengers.Around the same time Sharma and his friends were turning back from the SFO airport, Tara Smith returned from India with her three children, flying via Dubai. They were all healthy but it was a terrifying ordeal on a 15-hour flight with a wheezing, coughing elderly lady behind them. When they disembarked at SFO, there was no screening despite the fact they had been exposed for over two weeks to throngs of people abroad. They breezed through customs and immigration in record time after filling out a self-declaration that they did not have fever or cough. It was only their personal good sense that they reached home and self-quarantined for two weeks.The contrasting experience of two groups underscores the lack of common protocol and practices among nations as millions of people find themselves stranded and left to their own devices in the time of coronavirus. While Smith is relieved to be back home before the world shutters down completely, Sharma and his friends are camped out on balcony of the now almost empty ship, looking at the San Francisco skyline and wondering how they will ever get back home. “We spend most of the day talking to each other and our families. Luckily we still have free wi-fi on the ship,” Sharma told ToI over phone, adding that they were also doing some meditation and exercise to keep themselves healthy and build up resistance while waiting for the Indian government to rescue them.While Sharma and crew can consider themselves lucky that they still have access to food and have some money, thousands of Indians stranded across the world, from Iran to Italy, are fast running out of both as airlines scrap flights and governments shut down travel gates in an effort to contain the virus from spreading. In the U.S., nearly 200,000 Indian students are facing the brunt of disruption as universities have moved most classes online and some campuses have shit down. “We can manage a week or two but the real challenge is if this lasts months,” a University of Maryland student who did not want his name to be used said, as he stood in line at Patel brothers in College Park, where shoppers on Tuesday cleaned out the store in matter of hours in a frenzy of survival shopping.The long-term implications of the pandemic on not just travel, but even jobs and the economy is only just beginning to unfold – and unfold rapidly at that. Sharma, who works for Hughes Systique in Gurgaon, was on deputation to the Grand Princess cruiseliner, working on its IT systems, when the coronavirus panic struck. It was an exciting gig, traveling the world doing what he loves. “When the year began, I could not even imagine something like this could happen,” he said. Now he’s not sure he’ll even have a job when he returns home.