Michigan teacher isolates in bathroom for 5 hours after testing positive for Covid mid-flight

A Michigan teacher’s trip to Iceland took a dramatic turn when she discovered that she was positive for COVID-19 midway through her flight and voluntarily self-isolated for five hours in the plane’s bathroom.

Marisa Fotieo begun to feel ill while on board her Icelandair flight from Chicago to Reykjavík, Iceland, before Christmas and took her own rapid test to find out if she had COVID.

“I just took my rapid test and I brought it into the bathroom, and within what felt like two seconds there were two lines (indicating a positive test),” Fotieo told Today in an interview that aired Wednesday.

Instead of exposing her fellow passengers to the virus, Fotieo confined herself inside the aircraft’s bathroom for roughly five hours.

“There’s 150 people on the flight, and my biggest fear was giving it to them,” she explained to NBC News’ Steve Patterson.

“It was a crazy experience,” she added.

Fotieo documented the ordeal on TikTok in a video that has garnered over 1.4 million likes. “Shout out to @Icelandair for my VIP quarantine quarters,” she captioned the clip, which saw her masked up in the small airplane restroom.

Fotieo credits Icelandair attendant Ragnhildur “Rocky” Eiríksdóttir for assisting her throughout the flight.

“She made sure I had everything I needed for the next five hours from food to drinks and constantly checked on me assuring me I would be all right,” Fotieo shared with NBC News.

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If that wasn’t enough, Eiríksdóttir went a step further and made sure to bring some holiday cheer to Fotieo as she quarantined at Red Cross hotel in Iceland.

“She bought me flowers and a little Christmas tree with lights so I could hang it,” Fotieo said. “It was so heartfelt, and she’s just an angel.”

Fotieo is not alone in having holiday travel plans affected by the surge in COVID cases due to the omicron variant. Across the globe, the number of flight cancellations for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day totaled more than 3,800, according to Flight Aware data obtained by the New York Times.

Additionally, the United States recorded a single-day record high of more than 441,000 new COVID cases on Monday due to the highly transmissible omicron variant.