Early Thursday morning, Michal Ruprecht arrived at Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport around 2 a.m. and told the airline counter agent he was traveling to Michigan.
“He did this sort of double look and asked me, was I sure I was going to Michigan?” he recalls, News.Az reports, citing NPR.
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Ruprecht, a medical student and freelance reporter, was returning home after a month-long reporting trip to Uganda, where he was working on stories for NPR.
The man at the counter showed Ruprecht a memo from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “He tells me that I have to arrive at Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD),” Ruprecht says, “The first thing that was going through my head was denial. I wasn’t sure if this was real.”
Ruprecht was one of the first passengers to fly under a policy announced just hours before: all Americans who have passed through Uganda, South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the past 21 days must fly into IAD, an airport in a Virginia suburb of Washington, DC.
Two additional U.S. airport options were added Friday evening: the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.
The African countries, the DRC and Uganda, have been hit by a growing Ebola outbreak, which the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern on May 17. Already, there are 800 suspected cases and more than 180 suspected deaths, according to the WHO.
A major component of the U.S. response has been travel restrictions, on those who have recently come through affected countries: routing U.S. citizens to specified entry points, reserving the right to deny entry to permanent residents and barring most others.
At the Ugandan airport, Ruprecht frantically rebooked his flights. When he arrived at Dulles airport after 20 hours of travel, he was flagged for extra screening.
Officials for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ushered him into a temporary clinic. “They put these tarps up that created pseudo-doctor office rooms,” Ruprecht says, “It looked like a makeshift campsite.”
