Aaron Rodgers Details 'Panic in the Air' at Peru Airport Before Closures Due to Coronavirus

Aaron Rodgers said his narrow escape home while traveling during the coronavirus pandemic was something out of a movie.

On Friday, the Green Bay Packers quarterback, 36, called into The Pat McAfee Show, telling the radio broadcaster about his journey home from a trip to Cusco, Peru, nine days ago that came down to the wire as the country began to make travel closures to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Rodgers, who was traveling with three others and has not experienced symptoms, said the “ordeal” felt like the suspenseful climax of 2012’s Argo, in which the characters rush to catch a flight home.

“Nobody was chasing us, thankfully, or holding us,” he said, referencing the Ben Affleck-directed movie. “We didn’t have to speak Farsi to get back into the country, but there were some moments where we worried we were not going to get out.”

The NFL star said it was “absolute pandemonium at the airport” as people tried to catch their flights.

“When we rolled up to the airport at, like, 7 in the morning, it was wall-to-wall people and you couldn’t move,” Rodgers recalled. “I was thinking, ‘This isn’t very safe.’ Not many masks on, and there was definitely a panic in the air.”

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Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Aaron Rodgers

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The athlete continued: “But somehow [we] made it through, and then they shut the airport down because it was really bad weather. They had a drop-dead time where they were going to shut the entire airport down — we made it by about 15 minutes.”

According to data compiled by The New York Times, last updated on March 28, Peru has reported a total of 635 confirmed cases of the respiratory virus and 11 deaths. In the United States, there have been at least 102,636 cases and 1,646 deaths, per the Times‘ count.

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