According to media reports, an American woman had to isolate for three hours in the bathroom of an airplane after she was found to be COVID-19 positive halfway during a flight from Chicago to Iceland. WABC-TV reported that Marisa Fotoio, a teacher from Michigan, said that on December 19 she started having a sore throat during the trip, so she went to the bathroom to take a rapid Covid-19 test, which confirmed she was infected.
Before the flight, Photio told CNN that he did two PCR tests and about five rapid tests, all of which came back negative, but about an hour and a half into the flight, Photio developed a sore throat.
“My mind started spinning and I thought, OK, I just do one more test. That should give me a little satisfaction, but it came back positive right away,” Foto said.
The photos were completely vaccinated and she also took a booster dose. She does her corona test regularly, as she works with an uneducated population. When she got her test results in the bathroom of the airplane, she was terrified.
“The first flight attendant I met was Rocky. I was panicking, I was crying,” Foto said. She continued, “I was nervous for my family, with whom I had just had dinner. I was nervous for the other people on the plane. I was nervous for myself.”
The report said that the flight attendant helped a lot in pacifying the photos. “Of course, it’s a tense moment when something like this happens, but it’s part of our job,” the flight attendant told CNN.
The flight attendant said that they tried to re-arrange so that the photos could be seated in one place alone, but the flight was in the sky.
“When she came back and told me she couldn’t find the right seating area, I opted to stay in the bathroom, because I didn’t want to be around others on the flight,” Foto said.
Then a note was put on the bathroom door, which read, “Out of Service”, and Fotoi had to sit there for the rest of his journey.
Policies vary between airlines on how to handle a COVID-positive passenger. This comes just weeks after the US and other countries imposed travel restrictions amid the spread of Omicron variants.
Once the plane landed in Iceland, Fotio and his family were the last to disembark. Since his brother and father had no symptoms, they could fly to Switzerland on their connecting flight. He said that rapid and RT-PCR test of the photos was done at the airport and both came back positive.
.