Travelers brought coronavirus to LAX in March, but no one notified the crew or other passengers.

Photo:
Sandy Huffaker / Getty Images

At least two long-haul flights arriving at Los Angeles airport (LAX) in March brought passengers with coronavirus who later became seriously ill. One of them died. However, the authorities did not notify the people who traveled with them on the same flight, according to Los Angeles Times.

The first of the flights departed from Seoul, the capital of South Korea, the March 8. The affected passenger reported that she had had fever before boarding the plane and had suffered cardiac arrest the morning after landing. He was the first person to die of COVID-19 in Los Angeles County.

The second, from American Airlines, took off at John F. Kennedy Airport in mid-March, when the coronavirus began to close much of the country. Although the plane was almost empty, 49 passengers and eight crew members shared toilets, cabin air, and narrow hallways during a three-hour flight. In first class was a retired surgeon, who was taken by ambulance the day after landing to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with a high fever and cough with phlegm.

The virus spread quickly among people he came into contact with in the hours after he left LAX. At the Westside facility, a 32-year-old nurse and a dozen others died later.

The more than 200 people who traveled with the two infected also came to their communities without knowing that they had been exposed to the virus. and without testing or instructions to quarantine, which probably sowed new outbreaks.

Back then, Los Angeles had fewer than 250 confirmed cases and local health authorities said the county was investigating each case and doing a thorough tracking of the contacts to control the spread of the virus.

Now, when the county and state have already opened most of their establishments with limitations, in Los Angeles there are 72,057 confirmed cases and in the state 150,101, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.