A newly reported case in Texas could be the first instance of an airline passenger dying of COVID-19 on a flight.
Although the incident happened in July, it was only this week that Dallas County officials confirmed the cause of death was COVID-19.
According to a report from Dallas County Health and Human Services, the victim was a woman in her 30s – a resident of Garland, Texas — who was traveling from Arizona to Dallas on July 25. “She expired on an interstate airline flight, and did have underlying high risk health conditions,” the agency said.
The report didn’t identify the airline involved, or the airports where the woman departed and arrived.
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins told the local NBC TV affiliate that the woman was having trouble breathing, and after the plane had landed, “they tried to give her oxygen. It was not successful, and she died on the jetway,” Jenkins said in an interview.
It was unclear whether the woman knew she had the disease when she boarded. Major airlines began requiring passengers to wear face masks on board in May, but it wasn’t until more than two months later that they really started to crack down on violators after too many complaints and online videos from travelers showing that the rule often wasn’t enforced.
Some U.S. airports have started pilot programs to check travelers’ temperatures in an effort to prevent sick passengers from getting on a plane. Frontier Airlines is the only large U.S. carrier that has a firm policy of checking every passenger’s temperature at the airport before boarding – something it has been doing since June.
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Airlines and airports have long been urging the federal government to impose a nationwide system of passenger temperature checks, to be undertaken by the Transportation Security Administration at its screening checkpoints. But so far the agency has shown little interest in taking up that additional responsibility. Universal temperature checks are much more common at foreign airports.
Frontier Airlines has been checking passengers' temperatures since June.
Frontier AirlinesA few weeks ago, two members of the Senate Commerce Committee introduced a bipartisan bill that would require TSA to implement temperature checks. The bill would give the agency 120 days to conduct pilot testing of various temperature screening technologies, and then another 90 days to create a national plan to implement the policy.
Critics maintain that temperature checks wouldn’t be 100% effective because individuals who were newly infected with the COVID-19 virus but weren’t yet showing symptoms – including a fever — wouldn’t be identified by the procedure.
Interestingly, the report of this incident comes on the heels of a Deparment of Defense study showing that it's nearly impossible to contract COVID-19 in flight.
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Airline passenger dies of COVID-19 on plane - SF Gate
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