LONG LINES AT AIRPORTS AS CORONAVIRUS GROWS
…The Dulles Airport Departure Hall
The Trump administration again gave-out
mis-information about Dulles International Airport.
This
is not one of my blog articles. I
decided to re-introduce an important article by Ms. Cheryl Benard. Ms. Benard is a former senior analyst with the RAND Corporation
and has written about health systems in conflict environments.
Like thousands of Americans and Europeans
scrambling to get to the United States before the travel ban went into effect
and flights were canceled, I flew back to the United States from Vienna on
Friday. Arriving at Dulles International Airport via London, I encountered a
case study in how to spread a pandemic.
I had thought I was lucky to get one of the
last seats home. And I was confident, because Dulles had been identified by the
administration as one of the handful of U.S. airports equipped to test arriving
passengers and admit or quarantine them accordingly, that I would find a
rigorous protocol in place upon arrival. Obviously, the administration would
not take such a momentous step without solid preparation.
I could not have been more wrong. Upon landing,
I spent three hours in a jammed immigration hall trying to decide which analogy
fit better: the ignorant Middle Ages during the plague years, or the most
chaotic airport in the least developed country.
The pictures you may have seen only begin to
capture the chaos. There was no attempt to enable social distancing; we were
packed closely together. Two giant queues of people — one for U.S. citizens and
green-card holders and one for foreign nationals — wound their way through the
cavernous hall. I counted and came up with approximately 450 people in each
section, for a total of just under a thousand. Many were coughing, sneezing and
looking unwell.
When I inched closer to the front, I could see
that a scant six immigration desks were in service. Two additional desks to the
left had less traffic. These are ordinarily for people in wheelchairs; now, the
wheelchairs were mixed in with the rest.
When I asked a security guard about the other
lines, he told me they were for people with a confirmed corona diagnosis. There
was no separation for this group — no plastic sheets, not even a bit of
distance. When your line snaked to the left, you were inches away from the
infected.
I recently flew to Qatar for a meeting.
Immediately upon disembarking, passengers walked past a temperature measuring
device to identify those with a fever, so they could be segregated out before
entering public areas. Dulles had no such plan. Instead, after the agent
examined your passport, he pointed a thermometer device at your forehead. By
that time, you would have spent three hours in close contact with hundreds of
other people. Even the way the lines were organized, snaking around, might have
been designed to ensure that one sick person would expose the maximum number of
others.
Some of the agents were asking people to use
the fingerprint screen — all fingers, then the thumbs. Mine didn’t, but I
watched the adjoining one and was astounded to see that the screen was not
wiped, sprayed or in any way sanitized between individuals, or indeed at all
during the hour I had it in my line of sight. My agent asked me how I felt (the
true answer would have been upset by your colossal ineptitude) and if I had
been to China or Italy. (I had not.)
That was it. No instruction to maintain a
two-week self-quarantine. No phone number to call if I felt symptoms — standard
in Europe for several weeks. After being immersed in our three-hour virus
incubator, we were unleashed on the American public, free to mingle. This had
to be going on all day and further into the night, as flights kept landing and
the immigration hall kept filling with new passengers.
There was a better way. The travel ban should
not have been announced until the airports were prepared. People should have
been held on planes and disembarked in small groups, led past
temperature-measuring devices and then admitted planeload by planeload, to
reduce mingling. Dulles has two sets of buses to take people from plane to the
terminal, for Washington arrivals and transit passengers. They could have been
repurposed for U.S. citizens and foreign nationals. An immigration officer
could have processed people while still on the bus.
Need I mention that a containment area for sick
passengers might be advisable? Or telling people what to do if they feel sick?
The day after I arrived, my doctor told me that tests were not available even
for people with symptoms, and if I developed any, I should go to the hospital.
If that’s not the official policy, that has not been communicated even to our
doctors, let alone our citizens.
When he announced the travel ban, President
Trump described it as an effort to keep out foreigners who might bring the
virus to our shores. Instead, his actions caused an abrupt and dramatic influx
of potentially infected people, with no attempt made to manage or control it.
Dulles is a terrible, and terrifying, microcosm of a disaster magnified by
incompetence.
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