A British tourist has told how he and three friends have been held in “dark, cramped” hotel rooms in Vietnam for a week over coronavirus concerns.
Londoner Jake Anderson, 23, said he and his friends have missed their flight home and fear being stranded indefinitely as countries around the world go into lockdown.
Mr Anderson travelled to the Far East with his companions on March 12 for a friend’s wedding, which was later cancelled. His mother Anna Rietig, a former Met Police officer, had flown out four days earlier.
A number of people in the wedding party were told passengers on their flights had tested positive for coronavirus, and the friends were last week ordered to be tested.
Mr Anderson said they have since been held in a room with no natural light and only one small breakfast and a small bottle of water a day provided.
Mr Anderson, from Herne Hill, said they had been threatened with arrest if they try to leave. “Whenever we check, about four or five times a day, if we’ve got any results back, no information is able to be given to us.
“At the moment we are just praying we can find a solution. We have been threatened with arrest if we leave the hotel and make a break for the airport,” he said.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has said British tourists stranded abroad will be offered emergency loans to help get them home “as a last resort” after 80 countries placed restrictions on borders in three days.
The friends, including Iago Froede O’Flynn, Danilo Gomez-Cravitz, and Noah Perez Juckes, all 22, are being held in twin rooms at the Rising Dragon Villa Hotel in Hanoi.
Mr Anderson said: “We haven’t been allowed to leave the rooms. We’ve had no human contact; there isn’t any direct sunlight. We’re stuck in a tiny room.
“There’s not a lot of movement that we can do to try to keep active. It’s quite hot, the air con isn’t really working either, so conditions are getting quite dire: obviously hunger setting in and sanity-wise, after seven days of sitting in a room, isn’t the most exciting thing to be doing.”
He said they had been speaking to UK and Vietnamese officials, but “absolutely no one” has been able to give them any information. He added: “The final flight from Hanoi back to London has been and gone. We had tickets for it. We are just hanging on.”
Mrs Rietig, 58, who flew home on March 22, the day her son and friends were also due to return to the UK, said: “It is a total, total nightmare. I had to leave them. They told me ‘just get out of here’, but now they are stuck with no more flights. All the boys want to know is their test results and how long they will be quarantined for. They also need paperwork in order to travel if they need to stop over in other countries to get home.
“But there is just a wall of silence. No one is providing any answers to these questions, and there is no guidance as to how or who can provide them.”
Vietnam has 134 cases of coronavirus but no deaths as yet. It has been aggressively tracing any infected person’s contacts, with widespread enforced quarantines and self-isolation for anyone suspected of coming in to contact with the virus.
A spokeswoman for the hotel said the friends would be confined to their rooms until their test results come back, which were expected on Friday.
She said: “Normally the test results take two or three days but because Covid-19 is spreading in the country it is taking longer. They are not allowed to come down. But they get complimentary breakfast and water.”
A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: “The FCO is working around the clock to support British travellers in this situation.”
