272 Lebanon returnees get quarantined
Some 272 Bangladeshi migrant workers returned home from Lebanon yesterday amid a ban on incoming passengers from the Middle East country due to a rapid surge in coronavirus infections.
Except two, the rest were sent to the institutional quarantine for 14 days at the city's Ashkona Hajj Camp, Shahriar Sazzad, in-charge of the health desk at the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport, told The Daily Star.
The government will bear their expenses during their stay in quarantine, said Sazzad.
A sick and aged worker was admitted to a city hospital, while a pregnant worker was allowed to stay in home quarantine on humanitarian grounds, he added.
At first, the returnees refused to go to the institutional quarantine and staged demonstrations at the airport. Relatives of many workers also joined them, airport sources said.
"But following discussions with the respective officials, they finally agreed to go to the Hajj Camp to be quarantined," Sazzad said.
Sources at the airport said carrying the Bangladeshi workers, a special chartered flight of Biman was supposed to land in Bangladesh on April 1 but the flight had to be delayed.
An airport official, wishing anonymity, said yesterday the flight was not initially allowed to land. The flight landed at 3:30am following foreign ministry intervention.
The Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh on April 1 announced that passengers from the European countries, except the UK, and 12 other countries will not be allowed to enter Bangladesh from April 3. The ban would continue till April 18.
Lebanon is among the 12 countries.
According to sources at the Bangladesh embassy in Lebanon, the embassy took special permission from CAAB for operating the special flight.
The embassy added that the respective authorities of Bangladesh also did not inform them about mandatory institutional quarantine.
The return of 272 is part of an ongoing repatriation of Bangladeshi migrant workers from Lebanon.
Those who returned yesterday were undocumented workers, sources said.
Although a total of 283 workers were supposed to return, 272 came back home. The rest couldn't avail the flight as some of them tested positive for Covid-19 and others due to case-related issues.
Around 1.30 lakh Bangladeshi migrant workers in Lebanon have been facing an acute financial hardship amid an economic downturn, worsened by its US dollar shortage, according to reports by international media.
Plagued by this crisis, 5,990 migrant workers have applied for repatriation via the Bangladesh mission as of March 19, while several thousand others were waiting to be registered for return.
According to the Bangladesh mission in Beirut, as of late March, over 4,600 of the registered workers have been repatriated in special flights starting from February 15.
Around 10,000 Bangladeshi workers, in addition to those already registered, were waiting to come back home but many of them are unable to manage the money to pay for the air ticket.
Shariful Hasan, head of Brac's migration programme, yesterday said nearly 6,000 Bangladeshis returned from the Middle East country between April and December last year.
He said Lebanon's economic downturn, dollar crisis, and absence of good governance caused serious impact on Bangladeshis working there.
Shariful added that the situation worsened after the Beirut explosion in August last year.