"For me it has been a shock. It is one of the worst things I have experienced in my life." This is how Verónica Tribaldos summarizes the nightmare she has suffered this Friday, which began moments after landing at the Lanzarote airport. "Three or four minutes later, I see some men dressed in white, with spacesuits, with gloves, with everything, entering the plane, and I say: Something is happening here."
At that moment, neither she nor the other 140 passengers on that flight from Madrid knew that they had shared a plane with a man who had just tested positive for Covid-19. And in Verónica's case, sitting in the same row, 36, although on the other side of the aisle. "The two men stopped in front of me and said: You have to get up, go to the front of the plane and stay there. And quickly," this passenger told La Voz, explaining that when she saw them up close she saw that they were Civil Guard officers.
Then she grabbed her bag without knowing what was happening and went to the front, where she remained for about 15 minutes "waiting for instructions." "People were looking everywhere and asking what was happening," explains Verónica. She says that at that moment she was already "very nervous", but the worst was yet to come. "When I got off the plane and saw an ambulance on the runway, it flashed so much that I thought: I might die."
"I thought I could be dead in 14 days"
Verónica was one of the first to get off the plane and did so with the help of staff assisting people with reduced mobility, as she suffers from a muscular disease that sometimes forces her to move in a wheelchair. "The ambulance wasn't for me, but when I saw it, that went through my head: that in 14 days I could be dead", she recalls, still with the "scare" in her body.
At that moment she had already been informed that there was a passenger with coronavirus on the plane, but what she did not yet know was that he was sitting in her same row. She was told this later, on the ground, by one of the Civil Guard officers who had boarded the plane. "I am very grateful that he told me, because I needed to know," she says, even though that has increased her concern.
"Then I calmed down, talking on the phone with my sister", she explains. And although she admits that the "fear" of having suffered a contagion is still there, she believes that the possibilities are slim, because she has not been less than two meters away from the affected passenger. In addition, she is 42 years old and does not suffer from pathologies that could be complicated by Covid-19, so she is not in the risk groups to suffer from this disease. "If I had it, well, it will be fought," she says.
"I would tell him that he is a scoundrel and an irresponsible person"
For the moment, both she and the rest of the passengers on the flight must remain in quarantine for 14 days. In some cases, they have been transferred to one of the hotels in Puerto del Carmen that had been made available to the Cabildo for this health crisis, but Verónica has gone to the house that her family has in Arrecife, where she will be alone because her family lives in the Peninsula.
Now she says that she is trying to "live a little calmly" that quarantine, and the biggest concern has become to reassure her mother, who is 76 years old and has health problems. "I don't want to make her suffer much, but she found out through the press and started asking me things on the phone," she says. The other immediate concern is the damage that this forced quarantine is going to cause her, since she is in the middle of moving from Lanzarote to the peninsula and was planning to leave again on June 2, to continue there the business she was starting.
"If I could talk to that passenger I would tell him that he is a scoundrel and an irresponsible person. I would like to see him when he gets better and have him pay me for what he has made me lose. And to the rest of society as well," says Verónica. "He has generated a very serious problem, not only for the health of all the people who were on the plane, but for the whole island. And he has truncated part of my work and made me lose money. I think it's very bad. I think it's a lack of respect towards all of Spain on his part. He could have waited for them to give him the positive or negative result of the test. It's a lack of respect to the whole country," she questions indignantly.
As La Voz had already reported, the affected passenger -who is a resident of Lanzarote and had traveled to the Peninsula to attend his mother's funeral- had been in contact with a possible source of contagion and was tested for Covid-19. But without waiting for the results and without keeping the isolation that he should have followed for being a suspected case, he boarded the plane. It was when going to notify the positive result that the health authorities learned that he had taken a flight, so a device of the Civil Guard, the Security and Emergency Consortium and the Canary Islands Emergency Service was waiting for the flight upon arrival on the island.
They didn't even take their temperature in Madrid
In addition to criticizing the "irresponsibility" of this passenger, Verónica also questions how airports are being managed in the face of the Covid-19 crisis. "We are in the middle of a pandemic. The least they can do is spend money and test us before flying," she demands. However, according to her, in this case even the most basic rules that are established, such as taking the temperature of passengers, had not been complied with. In fact, it was upon arrival in Lanzarote that this control was carried out, and another of the people who traveled on the plane had a fever of 38.
In Madrid, according to Verónica, they have not used thermometers in the controls nor have they even asked for the document that passengers must carry declaring that the trip is due to justified causes, such as work or health reasons. "The justification was not requested until we landed in Lanzarote," she explains, pointing out that "airports are very poorly managed" and there are "many irregularities."
In addition, she says that among the passengers she has been able to talk to during the hours of waiting at the airport, there were some who came "on semi-vacation" to the island. "There have been very irresponsible people on that flight," she laments.
The only thing she says that had been complied with is the distances inside the plane, since the center seats were free. Thus, there was no one sitting next to the passenger with Covid-19, who was traveling next to the window. The closest was a child of about 8 years old, according to Verónica, who does not know if he was traveling with him or not. She was sitting on the other side of the aisle, in a seat that she will hardly forget: the 36-C.
Moments "of great tension" in the terminal
As for the three and a half hours that the passengers have spent at the Guacimeta airport, she says that they have been moments "of great tension". According to her, when they left the plane they were taken to the boarding area of T1, where they were divided into groups and given information and their data were taken. "They explained that we had to do mandatory and total quarantine," she says.
In her case, it was at 4:20 p.m., almost three and a half hours after landing, when she was finally able to leave for her house, in one of the emergency vehicles that have been mobilized to transport the passengers. And during that time, they have not even been able to eat. "When they were going to start bringing us they gave us a bottle of water each, nothing else," she explains.
Thus, the first time she has been able to eat something has been almost at 7 p.m., when a friend has come to leave her some food at the door, because she cannot leave the house even to buy because of the quarantine.
The "second worst" experience, after the one she lived at 7 years old
"It is the second worst experience I have lived in my entire life," says Verónica when recounting what these last hours have meant. The first, she says, she suffered when she was 7 years old and learned on television that her father had suffered a terrorist attack. At that time she lived in Pamplona and her father was a National Police officer. "That day they didn't take me to school in the morning and I noticed that there was bad vibes in my house, but I didn't quite understand it. My mother was crying and my older sister too, but they didn't tell me anything," she recalls.
Finally, she says that she understood what was happening when she saw her father on television, in a hospital bed. He survived the ETA attack, but Verónica says that he was left with both physical and psychological sequelae. "This year is being hard because my father died last year," adds Verónica, who explains that this has led her to live even worse the episode of this Friday, not being in a good emotional moment.
Trip for moving and work reasons
Regarding the reason for her trip, Verónica explains that she is a businesswoman and has a professional and federated dog breeding, which she intended to install in Lanzarote. However, shortly before the start of the Covid-19 crisis she changed her plans and decided to return to the Peninsula, but the state of alarm caught her in the middle of the move.
In fact, she had left three dogs in a dog hotel on the island and had not been able to come until now to pick them up, due to the restrictions decreed throughout Spain. Finally, with the new activities allowed with the de-escalation, this Friday she got on a plane, with the intention of picking them up and returning next week, but the coronavirus has once again truncated and delayed her plans.
