Preschool teacher Marisa Fotieo was flying to Iceland when she started feeling a sore throat and gave herself a rapid test. She tells Inside Edition she self-isolated in the bathroom to keep others around her safe.
A Chicago woman isolated herself in a tiny plane bathroom after testing positive for COVID-19 mid-flight.
Preschool teacher Marisa Fotieo was flying to Iceland when she started feeling a sore throat and gave herself a rapid test. When she saw the bad news, she voluntarily stayed in the bathroom for four solid hours.
“I went in the bathroom and I took the test and within two seconds, there were two lines, and I was hysterical,” Fotieo said.
She says staying in the bathroom was “the best thing for [her] anxiety.”
“I just wanted everyone to be safe around me. For four hours it was just me and my phone in the bathroom,” Fotieo said.
After landing, Fotieo spent a lonely Christmas quarantining in a Reykjavik hotel, and she's still there today.
To lift her spirits, a flight attendant from the plane sent her gifts, including a little Christmas tree with lights.
“It’s been a wild ride, but I’m just happy that I’m not in hospital and I’m safe,” Fotieo said.
Meanwhile, there is concern that cloth masks may not be up to the task of protecting people from the Omicron variant. Experts now say only some masks protect against the super-contagious strain.
“You can do a very quick test by, maybe taking a candle, put your mask on. If you can blow out that candle through your mask, it’s probably letting aerosols through,” UCLA epidemiologist Dr. Anne Rimoin told Inside Edition.
The CDC is under fire over the new recommendation to cut quarantine time from 10 days to five, followed by five days of wearing a mask, with no insistence on a negative test.
CDC director Rochelle Walensky was taken to task over the new recommendations in a TV media blitz defending the new recommendations.
“This pandemic has given us a lot of new and updated science over the last two years, and it is my job to convey that science through those recommendations, and that is exactly what we are doing,” Walensky said.
In the U.S. a record average number of daily COVID-19 cases topped 267,000 over the last week.
