Comfort+ Passenger 'jokes' being Covid Positive - Would you notify FA?
 

Early morning domestic DL flight on Comfort+. 30 minutes after take off, Passenger in 13A begins coughing and sneezing repeatedly for 2 minutes. Their seatmate immediately unbuckles and stands up to sprint to the galley in disgust so he can notify FA to change his seat to Economy. The rest of the folks in C+ are giving this passenger stares in shock. This passenger begins to chuckle and shrugs their shoulders while murmuring "who knows, maybe I tested positive" as if its a joke.

Would you have reported this to the FA?

I would assume everyone on the plane is covid+. Mask up.

It is up to you.

To be honest even though I considered the early Covid to very serious, the omnicron varient looks no more than a bad flue. I am vaccinated, I follow mask rules. But I I am not overly concerned about this wave.

Question for you is if would be better for the flight to be aborted? Besides the delay issue, you could well end up with more total exposure by calling him out

BTW: His joke was idiotic.

If obviously joking, no. Unlike a bomb, there's technically nothing illegal about being onboard (domestically anyway) with Covid. Also there's no risk of immediate harm. Plus lying about having Covid isn't illegal. Stating you have a bomb, even if you don't is illegal.

At best (and only if it can be shown they knew when boarding and thus lied during self certification) they can be denied further travel by DL.

In very poor taste, but not everyone has good sense.

Now if they lied about having CV19 and then started coughing on you, you could make terroristic threat case. Context would matter greatly and there would need be no way it was considered a "joke."

Yep we are all masked up. But why would you fly if you are covid positive? :rolleyes:

Part of the check-in process is indicating that you don't have COVID symptoms and have not tested positive. I'm not sure about tattling about a "joke," but knowingly flying with COVID is a different matter altogether.

No.

Well this is why I postponed all non-emergency travel for the month of January and if I did have emergency travel that couldn't be postponed, I would be keeping my N95 on the whole time and maybe even throwing back to the double masking days

Plenty of reasons to cough and/or sneeze for two minutes that are not communicable disease concerns: asthma, allergies, dry cleaning fumes off-gassing from clothing, scented products off-gassing (think hand lotion, hair products, or duty-free perfume sampling), to name a few. And yes, some people say dumb things when feeling judged by the self-righteous. Mask up and settle down or don't fly.

You're not wrong about Omicron, but insisting to the universe that you definitely want it to be Omicron and not Delta that you catch is a bit tricky!

i was an unlucky soul lying on gig to JFK light when I suddenly began to cough as if my lungs needed to exit my body. The FA came rushing over with some water, and asked if I was ok. None of the passengers looked at me wierdly though.

I was embarrassed but since no one seemed to care I felt better.

If you can't deal with people coughing on planes, don't fly (commercial).

I'd just consider it a joke and move on. Was it a good joke to make? No.

At the end of the day, I don't trust people around me. I will take all the steps to protect myself and if I am uncomfortable with the possibility of getting sick, then I won't fly.

Way before COVID I've always felt uneasy sitting next to someone hacking up a lung because planes are enclosed spaces.

No. I stopped caring.

It's not exactly the most tasteful joke, but whatever. FAs have better things to do.

I think an over-zealous prosecutor could make a case. 18 USC 32(a)(7), and 35. It obviously seems like a stretch, but I wouldn't test it.