Rhea Paul, a speech language pathology professor at Sacred Heart University, was among the first passengers from Europe to land in the United States after President Trump’s European travel restrictions went into effect on Friday at 11:59 p.m.
Ms. Paul, 70, an American citizen who landed at Kennedy International Airport at about noon on Saturday, said the American Airlines pilot and the flight attendants made no mention of the coronavirus or what would happen once they got to New York during the eight-hour flight from Paris.
Then, when they landed, Ms. Paul said, “the pilot got on the intercom and said the Border Patrol was going to get on the plane and test everybody, but that this was all the information that they had.”
About 10 minutes later, the pilot announced it would instead be the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that would screen them, Ms. Paul said. But minutes later, while everyone still sat inside the plane, the pilot announced that United States Customs & Border Protection would be the ones testing the passengers on the jetway.
Agents wearing paper and plastic masks boarded the plane and handed the rest of the passengers a questionnaire to fill out before leaving the plane. It asked for their names, addresses, destinations, where they had been in Europe and if they had any symptoms including a fever, a cough or trouble breathing, she recounted.
Once they exited the plane, the passengers waited in line on the jetway where one by one they handed in the questionnaires to an agent. Another agent took their temperatures and logged it on a separate list.
“And then from there, we just went down through customs as usual,” Ms. Paul said.
“It really didn’t feel organized,” she said. “It seemed to me that for an airplane that left eight hours ago, there should have been time for whoever was doing the inspection to let the crew know what procedures would be so they could prepare the passengers. We didn’t get information that would have been perfectly easy to get had anyone thought ahead.”
The plane was about half-full, Ms. Paul said, and while the crew did not discuss the coronavirus, passengers did, at least in the economy section, where she was sitting. “Everybody felt a little nervous but people were trying to make jokes and take it light. There was quite a lot of camaraderie on the plane,” Ms. Paul said. “We all felt like we were in the same boat.”
Many of the passengers sitting near Ms. Paul, who had been in France as a visiting professor at the University of Tours, had, like her, scrambled to board the earliest flight to the United States after President Emmanuel Macron of France asked people to self-quarantine if they were 70 or older on Thursday, she said. “That combined with Trump’s speech made us feel like maybe we better get out now before we were not able to get back home,” she said.
Packing up her life in France was stressful, she said, but “once I got on the plane, everybody seemed very calm. Being on the plane was the best part of the trip and I don’t generally like flying.”
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