When the first alarms about the omicron variant came, Cecilia Stafsing was sitting at the airport in Cape Town.

She had been on holiday in Namibia for two weeks with her family and stopped in South Africa.

The plan was to travel to Amsterdam and fly on to Arlanda, but when the family landed at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands on Friday morning, they were left standing on the runway.

- The captain shouted that they did not know how to handle our arrival.

They had an emergency meeting at the airport, Cecilia says.

The passengers were also told that there was another plane in the same situation, and that it had come from Johannesburg.

- A concern that arose then was that we would mix with those passengers, because we understood that the situation with the mutation was at its worst there.

"Infected walked around the street"

Four hours later, the passengers were shown into a gate where they were all to be tested.

There, the exits were blocked by armed guards while people were crowded in queues to test themselves.

- We soon realized that we were sitting there with the Johannesburg plane.

We were 600 people in a relatively small area, she says.

The process would take four hours, but when the time had passed, no test results had been received.

The hours passed, and the mood became more and more tense.

- In the end, it started to go around people in the street who tested positive.

They were upset because they did not want to be locked up in quarantine.

There we were locked up with people who were infected and no one did anything about it.

At three o'clock at night, 16 hours after landing, Cecilia and her family were able to leave the gate with negative test results.

The plane towards Arlanda then took off on Saturday morning.

- It was a day's delay, but given the seriousness of the situation, we were able to accept all possible disruptions on this trip.

What we are upset about is the handling.

We would not have had to be exposed to this risk of infection.

Every tenth tested positive

61 of the 600 passengers tested positive, according to Dutch authorities.

That there were so many came as a surprise to Cecilia, as the passengers did not receive any information about the situation on site.

- I read it on your news site this morning.

We did not hear anything about it from an official source.

The only thing was that people went around swearing that they tested positive, otherwise we would not have known at all.

It has not yet been determined whether the infected carry the omicron variant.

Cecilia and her family feel healthy, but despite this there is a concern that they may have been infected.

Have you received any instructions from Swedish authorities?

- No, I do not know if anyone has thought that we are here.

In any case, no one has approached us with any information.

We have understood that we will put ourselves in quarantine and end it with a test, but that's just what we googled, says Cecilia Stafsing.