Texas Woman in Her 30s Dies of COVID on Airplane in New Mexico
Getty Airplane
A Texas woman died of coronavirus while on an airplane this summer, officials announced this week.
The woman, who was in her 30s, died on an interstate airline flight in New Mexico while the plane was still on the tarmac, a spokesperson for the office of Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins confirms to PEOPLE.
“It became difficult for her to breathe and they tried to give her oxygen,” Jenkins told KXAS. “It was not successful. She died on the jetway.”
Jenkins said the woman, who was from Dallas, had underlying high-risk health conditions. The spokesperson was unable to confirm the health conditions, citing privacy reasons.
Though the death occurred on July 25, officials in Dallas County only recently received the woman’s official cause of death, which is why it was announced in a press release on Sunday that reported three additional COVID deaths in the county.
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As of Monday, Dallas County had a total of 90,318 confirmed cases and 1,085 deaths, according to a Dallas County press release. Of all the cases that required hospitalizations, more than two-thirds have been people younger than 65 years old, and about one-third of all hospitalized patients had diabetes, the county said.
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The rising numbers are consistent with that of Texas as a whole, which has reported 873,556 confirmed cases and 17,564 deaths, according to The New York Times.
Meanwhile, despite rising numbers, the amount of people taking to the skies and traveling via plane has surged; more than 1 million passengers were screened by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) on Sunday, the highest number since March 17, the TSA said in a press release Monday.
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The agency also said it screened 6.1 million passengers at checkpoints nationwide between Oct. 12 and Oct. 18, the highest weekly volume since the start of the pandemic.
Many airlines have been requiring passengers to wear face masks for months, and others, including American Airlines and United Airlines, have offered various forms of coronavirus tests to passengers.
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