Seniors fly to Europe, catch flu, spend vacation in quarantine
The plan was for a group of Canadian seniors to enjoy a pleasant sightseeing trip to Germany, but an unexpected encounter with the flu sent half a dozen of them to hospital for more than a week.
"We ended up coming down with a case of influenza," Tom Jakobszen of Senior Discovery Tours told CBC Radio's Afternoon Drive in an interview from Zurich, Switzerland on Friday.
"What happened was that the people became so ill that we had to hospitalize them because we're very careful with our passengers," the Tecumseh, Ont., resident said.
"Everyone is covered with insurance and we hospitalized them only to discover that they had a strain of influenza that was not common to the area, so then they were all put into isolation."
Jakobszen said six of the group's 33 members, including his wife, Jane, were "very ill."
"She woke up in the morning not able to breathe," he said. "She had pneumonia, which was one of the effects of influenza."
The good news is that she and the rest of the group members who fell ill have recovered.
During their week in isolation they fought both illness and boredom, Jakobszen said: "They each had one book, that was it, so they read the books."
Most of the group returned home on Monday, but Jakobszen, his wife and three others will fly back on Saturday.
Jakobszen said one member of the group remains in Germany because of a separate medical issue, and she and her husband will return when she is able to fly again.
Jakobszen said he had never seen an entire tour group coming down with an illness.
"This has never happened before," he said. "This is such an anomaly, that we would have this kind of an illness occur.
"You know, travelling, once in a while you have someone who trips, breaks an ankle, might cut themselves — things like that happen. One out of every 10 trips, you might get an accident of some sort, but this was a little unusual, very unusual."
