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Savannah: A Michigan school teacher travelling over the holidays voluntarily isolated in a plane’s tiny toilet for five hours after testing positive for COVID-19 mid-flight.
Marisa Fotieo was on a flight to Reykjavik, Iceland from Chicago on December 20 when her throat began to hurt. With rapid antigen test kits handy, Fotieo decided to take one “and within what felt like two seconds” discovered she was positive for the virus.
US teacher Marisa Foteio filmed herself sitting out her aircraft toilet isolation and uploaded clips to TikTok.Credit:tiktok.com/@marisaefotieo
“There’s 150 people on the flight, and my biggest fear was giving it to them,” she told NBC’s Today Show.
She decided it would be best to quarantine herself in the aircraft’s toilet for the remainder of the flight which she estimated was five hours. She filmed what it was like in the tiny quarters in a video with over 4 million views on TikTok.
Fotieo said she was able to make it through isolating in the cramped space because of flight attendant Ragnhildur “Rocky” Eiríksdóttir, who provided food and drinks, and “constantly checked” on her.
Fotieo is one of many affected by COVID-19 during the holiday season as the Omicron variant surges.
The Centres for Disease Control recorded 486,428 new COVID cases in 24 hours on December 29, a substantial new record and is likely to have more than half a million new cases a day in the new year.
More than 1.7 million new COVID cases were recorded around the world on Wednesday, a 32 per cent increase from a day earlier and a new global record, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
It was the third day in a row that infections have surpassed the 1 million mark, driven by the highly mutated Omicron variant. Its greater transmissibility, combined with a shorter incubation period, ability to evade existing immunity and higher reproduction number, is expected to spur more records in the days to come.
On Thursday morning, US time, (Friday AEDT) more than 1100 flights were scrubbed as rising coronavirus cases hobbled staffing. Winter storms meanwhile threatened to further disrupt travel over New Year’s weekend.
The disruptions come after thousands of flights were cancelled over the Christmas holiday weekend and into early this week as winter storms combined with staffing shortages caused by the spread of coronavirus cases from the Omicron variant.
Almost 9000 more flights were substantially delayed, while the US top health agency, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, issued a warning against travelling on cruise ships, even if passengers were double-vaccinated and boosted.
The move delivers another blow to an industry that just started returning to the seas in June after a months-long suspension of voyages caused by the pandemic.
The agency raised its COVID-19 travel health notice level for cruise ships to four – its highest warning level – from three, citing reports of COVID-19 outbreaks on cruises.
More than 1100 flights were cancelled across the US on a single day, chiefly do to infections. Credit:AP
The health agency has investigated or started an investigation into COVID-19 cases on more than 90 ships.
“Even fully vaccinated travellers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants,” the CDC said on Friday (AEDT).
USA Today, Bloomberg, Reuters
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