Spain's Foreign Ministry and Consulate in Amsterdam and the Portuguese Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment after a Spanish man and Portuguese woman were forced to remain in isolation. The couple accused of trying to escape from COVID-19 quarantine in the Netherlands after testing positive for the coronavirus have been transferred to a hospital where they were being held in isolation, an official said on Monday. The pair left the hotel where travellers who tested positive for the virus were staying after arriving at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport from South Africa. "They have now been transferred to a hospital elsewhere in the Netherlands to ensure they are in isolation. They are now in so-called forced isolation," said Petra Faber, spokesperson for Haarlemmermeer municipality, where Schiphol is located just outside of the capital. (https://news.yahoo.com/couple-caught-fleeing-dutch-covid-104735086.html) The couple fled the hotel on Sunday and had boarded a plane to Spain when they were detained by military police at the airport, said Faber. Speaking to Catalonia's public television channel TV3, however, one of the pair, Carolina Pimenta, denied they had deliberately tried to evade quarantine. Pimenta, who was travelling with her partner Andrés Sanz, said she had thought she was exempt from a five-day quarantine order because she had a negative test result and had already contracted COVID-19 in the past six months. Pimenta said she had been permitted to leave the hotel by Dutch police and health officials and cleared all airport security checks with her passport and results of a PCR test. Just after boarding "suddenly they called me. Acting very aggressively, police treated us like criminals when their own colleagues had given us the authorization", she was quoted as saying. Spain's Foreign Ministry and Consulate in Amsterdam and the Portuguese Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.