Air travelers say they have been shocked by the bare-bones screening procedures at American airports amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“I said I was coming from Vietnam via Tokyo and [the customs agent] said, ‘Welcome back,’ and that was it,” Aneel Makhani, 38, a marketing professional from Brooklyn who landed at JFK Airport on Sunday, told The Post.
He said the procedure he faced upon his arrival in Vietnam on March 10 was strikingly different.
“They had this whole process,” he said, adding that it involved multiple layers of questioning about past travel and symptoms.
“I expected at minimum something like that [here] — to fill out a form and to have to talk to somebody specifically about [the virus].”
At a press briefing Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence said Americans arriving from abroad are “screened when they come home through a series of airports.”
But the protocol on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web site specifies health screenings only for people coming from countries with severe, community-spread outbreaks.
For everyone else, “they’re not doing anything,” said traveler Maria Guerrera, 65, who flew in from the Dominican Republic to JFK over the weekend.
“We checked ourselves on the machine and went to immigration and nothing about the virus,” Guerrera said.
Even some travelers from countries designated by the CDC as Level 3 nations experiencing “widespread ongoing spread” of the virus reported receiving minimal screening stateside.
Gabriel Katzman of Silver Spring, Md., traveled to Malaysia, Thailand and Japan — all Level 3 nations — before landing in Dallas Sunday afternoon.
He said authorities in Thailand took his temperature before he boarded in Chiang Mai and Bangkok. But after leaving Bangkok, he had a 90-minute layover in Tokyo and wasn’t checked before getting his flight back to the US.
US border agents asked only if he had traveled to mainland China, Iran or Europe, he said.
“I took a lot of caution and care, washing my hands a lot, trying to wear a mask when I was around other people,” said Katzman, 27.
“The process is almost working on an honor system. I essentially have to trust that other people are taking the same level of care as I am.”
A Manhattan resident who flew into New York, also from Thailand via Japan, said she was given a form on the flight from Tokyo asking her about her travel history, with a “questions for screener” section to be filled out when she landed.
But when she arrived at JFK on Saturday, no one asked her for it. She still has the form with the “questions for screener” blank.
“I got in my taxi and was like, ‘Oh, why do I still have this form?” said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous. “I had it in my hand with my passport the whole time.”
The alarming anecdotes came as the Transportation Security Administration said eight of its agents in the New York area have tested positive for the coronavirus — five at JFK, two at Newark and one at La Guardia.
Some were at work as recently as last week, according to an online database. All but one — a baggage handler at Newark — are screening officers.
The CDC did not return a request for comment.