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Comment by totony | Hacker News Reader

>I'm totally ok with covid19 positive Canadians being stuck an unable to return home until they test negative.

I am not; your home country should never deny you entry. You're telling a citizen he is not welcome in his own country, is that how you want to treat your citizens?

Quarantine is warranted but denying entry has a weird taste to me

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It's an imperfect solution. But thousands of people have left to the beach in Mexico, Florida, etc. We aren't talking of people that got surprised by COVID in March, we are talking of people that bought a plane ticket in the middle of the pandemic, traveled abroad for vacation, and are now inconvenienced by the fact they need to get tested to come back.

Not everyone is traveling to the beach on vacation. There are numerous valid, serious reasons people need to travel.

Assuming that every Canadian outside of the country was on vacation is simply wrong.

I'm also in the same situation with my home country. I was born there, has the country passport, don't mind 2 week quarantine, commercial airlines have expressed interest but they are simply not allowed. Only a pitiful amount of repatriation flights are done.

I can't believe it's harder to go back to my home country than to get a visa to the US. I'm lucky I can stay long-ish term in the US but many many others are screwed.

I understand the country is underequipped to deal with a lot of people coming back and it's better to protect many more people inside but I do feel forgotten sometimes. What's the point of having the citizenship then if I can't even come home?

I’m assuming this is Vietnam as I have friends going through the same issue. Citizens of Vietnam and they are on a 6-9 month waiting list for a repatriation flight with the gov’t basically saying “if you can stay where you are you can’t come here”.

They can’t even even pay for a commercial flights and quarantine like other countries.

And because Lunar New Year celebrations are coming up, repatriations flights have been cancelled until after as they are concerned with all the travel within the country.

There's a big problem of Vietnamese who are stranded and jobless in Japan -- they lost their (mostly travel-related) jobs, cannot pay tuition, and cannot return home:

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210103/p2a/00m/0na/00...

I guess the situation with Vietnam is more unique that I thought.

This is an unrelated rant since the absurdity of the situation got to me. If you can hear the rumors about the reasons why there are fewer repatriation flights in January though, it definitely takes the cake.

How do you ensure safe travel for a covid positive person?

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