The players have now been forced into 14 days of hard quarantine in hotel rooms which will greatly affect their preparations for the year's first Grand Slam.<\/p>\n
Some players have complained of quarantine "torture"<\/a> and others have claimed that they weren't aware of the risks before travelling to Australia – or that only sections of a plane with confirmed cases would then be forced to isolate.<\/p>\n Women's players Yulia Putinseva and Sorana Cirstea said that they may have skipped the Australian Open had they known there would be such strict rules on COVID-19 close-contacts.<\/p>\n "What I don't understand is that, why no one ever told us, if one person on board is positive the whole plane need to be isolated. I would think twice before coming here," Putinseva wrote on Twitter.<\/p>\n But Sitak exploded some myths in a video shared on social media.<\/p>\n https:\/\/twitter.com\/BenRothenberg\/status\/1350646874357850112?s=20<\/a><\/p>\n "I wanted to clarify something," Sitak said from his hotel room.<\/p>\n "We had a call with Tennis Australia about a month ago and not a lot of players were on that call, which was surprising to me.<\/p>\n "But hey, that's how it was.<\/p>\n "Basically Tennis Australia, the organisers, they told us the risks that we were going to be undertaking and they did mention that if somebody tests positive on the flight, it's going to be up to the health authorities to decide whether to quarantine all the flight or just isolate compartments of the plane.<\/p>\n "Now in our case, where the flight attendant tested positive, of course the whole plane has to be quarantined.<\/p>\n "So knowing the very, very strict rules of the Australian government regarding the virus, after that call, in my mind, I knew that if for some reason somebody tested positive on the plane, I'm going to have to quarantine for 14 days.<\/p>\n "So I was prepared to take that risk and I knew that was a possibility.<\/p>\n "I was hoping that wasn't going to happen."<\/p>\n Sitak also took a different slant to some players complaining about their treatment or the quality of their hotel food.<\/a><\/p>\n "I think we need to put some things into perspective," Sitak said.<\/p>\n "A lot of Australians at the moment cannot get home, because of the restrictions and all that, and we as foreigners, over 1000 people, we're here in Australia, we're going to be competing in a Grand Slam, earning a lot of money.<\/p>\n "And the amount of work that Tennis Australia has put in to organise all this, is absolutely insane – I can't even imagine how much work and how many hours they've put in to make this happen.<\/p>\n "So I just wanted to give a little perspective – we're still lucky to be here.<\/p>\n "It's unfortunate, the circumstances with the quarantine, but that's how it is."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" New Zealand doubles player Artem Sitak has added a fresh perspective to the COVID-19 quarantine debate firestorm that has engulfed the build-up to the Australian […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23480"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23480"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23482,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23480\/revisions\/23482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Some](\"https:\/\/vms-network-images-prod.s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com\/2021\/01\/337287\/pickerImage.jpg\")
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