My faithful and nightly use of iPhone’s do not disturb function saved me from a night of sleepless panic last Wednesday. I, along with my wife, Claire, had just that evening arrived in Barcelona to complete our long-planned adventure through Switzerland and Spain.
We awoke Thursday morning to our alarm and noticed a flurry of texts from friends and family: “Dude are you guys stuck in Europe??,” “Trump is stopping travel from Europe for 30 days starting Friday at midnight. You need to check on it,” and the more concise, “Yo. You stuck in Europe?”
Not knowing anything about the president’s proclamation, I immediately told Claire to start packing our stuff up while I worked on buying us tickets home. She instead thought to search for news stories about the newly announced travel restrictions, and she quickly discovered that the restrictions did not bar citizens from returning home, a significant detail that only one of our concerned messengers included.
We spent the next few hours reading about the restrictions and thinking about what to do. Should we go to the embassy for more information? Should we go to the airport? I found it most important, once we realized that we wouldn’t be refused entry into the United States, to ensure that airlines were not canceling flights to the U.S. I work for a regional airline and have access to the employee portal, and I began searching there for information about flight schedules, finding no information about cancellations from Europe.
We didn’t have much choice — the sole flight from Barcelona to Newark on Thursday morning was oversold by 15, and tickets were going for nearly $3,000. The flight on Friday was also oversold at the time, so we decided to remain on our original flight, scheduled for Saturday. We began reading news stories about all the travelers who flocked to Europe’s airports, desperately trying to get home. One traveler we met after landing in Newark on Saturday told us that he had been out at a bar in Barcelona with a bunch of friends and other Americans when everyone simultaneously began receiving texts and calls right around 3 a.m., just like we had, igniting a drunken panic. Two of his friends, he said, went straight from the bar to pick up their belongings and then straight to the airport.
When we arrived in Barcelona, we knew that Spain was going to be different than Switzerland, where we had spent the first half of the week, and where we were hardly aware of the novel coronavirus. When we arrived in Geneva on Sunday, March 8, we saw a sign in the airport that said something like, “If you are not sick, throw your mask in the waste bin and wash your hands.” I don’t remember reading anything on the trains or other public places about the virus.
There were a lot of developments, however, by the time we arrived in Spain on Wednesday, including the closure of Italy. We knew it would be different when our Airbnb host introduced us to the apartment and very quickly began discussing cases in Spain and predicting what might happen in the following days. “Just follow the news,” he told us, and the very next day, travel restrictions were put into place.
We were able to enjoy Barcelona, though popular sites such as La Sagrada Familia were starting to be restricted on Thursday. The church was then closed to the public on Friday. At dinner on Friday, we asked our waitress what was going to happen in Spain, and she told us that everything in Barcelona, aside from grocery stores and pharmacies, would be closed on Saturday, which we did not know.
The airport in Barcelona was packed with passengers on Saturday, but our flight left virtually without incident. Other than the flight crew’s rubber gloves and hearing nearly everyone talk about their disrupted travel plans, it was a relatively normal trip home — until we got to Newark Liberty International Airport.
We knew that because we had been in Europe, we would be screened upon arrival, but it was not clear what the process would be. We landed at about 3:40 p.m. and arrived at our gate shortly thereafter. As soon as the seat belt sign was turned off, everybody began standing up. The purser quickly came on the PA and said that because we had been in Europe, we would receive a mandatory health screening. She told everyone to return to their seats as we wait for a screening room to open up. The flight attendants then passed out information cards about COVID-19, along with forms that each passenger was to fill out with space for details about which countries we had visited, whether or not we had encountered someone with the virus, and our names and addresses. The information cards direct all passengers to stay at home for 14 days and to self-monitor for the development of symptoms.
We sat on the airplane for at least an hour, waiting for a testing room. A voice came back on to tell us we were still waiting for a testing room. About 20 minutes later, we were told that they were going to begin screening us 20 people at a time. Naturally, everyone was exhausted and frustrated and ready to get off the airplane. About 20 minutes later, the voice came back on and told us all to deplane at once.
We were marshaled through the airport and stood in a long line, eventually to have our temperatures taken. A masked official directed the thermometer to each of our foreheads. Once the machine beeped with no fever, we moved on. We saw at least one family pulled out of the line and taken away before the temperature screening. They had perhaps been in Italy or China or had been exposed to the virus elsewhere. We then gave our health forms to another official and continued on to the very long customs line.
As we got closer to the front of the line, we began noticing that, following the passport and declaration form checks, customs officers were leaving their stations and directing some passengers to another line. Once it was our turn, the customs officer scanned our documents and directed us to that other line as he took our documents to a room at the front of the line. I asked him why, and he said it was because we were in Europe. He didn’t give us any more information than that.
He told us to listen for our names and that they would return our passports to us. One passenger in the line suggested that they were going to give us individual instructions on self-quarantining. We waited for about 20 minutes as customs officers yelled out passengers’ names, often inaudibly due to the masks covering their faces. One officer yelled a name, and when nobody came for it, said, “I’m not going to yell it more than once.” At one point, we saw a commotion and an officer running toward something, and then another, and eventually, they emerged from the crowd, escorting a young man by his arms.
The officers were excoriating him for running, saying it made them suspicious, and it became clear that officers had called his name to retrieve his passport. “I’m sorry, I have been waiting here for seven hours, and I just want to go home,” he said, as officers let him go. One passenger waiting said she saw people leaving without getting their passports back at all, saying that it wasn’t worth missing their connecting flights home.
Eventually, our names were called. The officer gave us our passports and didn’t say anything to us. I asked her what all this means, and why they took our passports into this room. Her stern reply was short: “Watch the news.” It took us nearly four hours from the time the airplane door opened until we arrived at the gate for our flight home to South Carolina.
Understanding that Saturday was the first day of this new screening process, we knew that it would take time. We also realized later that it could have been worse, as some passengers at Chicago O’Hare International Airport reportedly waited six hours to complete the screening process. The most frustrating part was the lack of information we received when our passports were taken away.
In any case, we are glad to be home and are following the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance to self-quarantine at home for 14 days. My wife, who is in the midst of her final semester of graduate school, was going to be home anyway because all of her classes have been canceled until early April. I also notified my company that I won’t be working for the next two weeks, putting a leave request in on Sunday.
We’ll see how the next few weeks go, but hopefully, all the measures to contain the pandemic are successful, and our world can start to return to normal next month.
Jeremy Beaman (@jeremywbeaman) is a former Student Free Press Association journalism fellow with the Washington Examiner commentary page.
