A cough, a coronavirus check and why a passenger had to be subdued on a plane in China

HONG KONG — Thai Airways staff had to restrain a Chinese woman after she coughed at a flight attendant while passengers waited for hours to get a coronavirus check upon landing in Shanghai from Bangkok.

The carrier said the woman coughed deliberately at the attendant because she was angered about the long wait for a check on Friday (March 6). It said the passengers had to wait seven hours to be screened at Shanghai Pudong International Airport.

Thai Airways said that after the passenger coughed at the female attendant, some of her colleagues approached the passenger to stop her "inappropriate" behaviour. They then explained the situation to her and asked her to cooperate and calm down, the airline said.

The woman had to be subdued and no further action was taken, the airline said in a statement.

In footage posted online, the woman is subdued by at least one male attendant, who presses her into her seat by her neck as two more male attendants stand nearby, saying "sit down" to her in English.

The woman then yells "What have I done?" in Chinese.

Thai Airways said that every passenger arriving in Shanghai or flying through the airport from countries with a high incidence of coronavirus cases such as Italy, South Korea, Japan and Iran must be examined by medical staff on the aircraft. Planes that were not checked were not permitted to open their doors to let passengers off.

The airline said the length of wait depended upon the number of passengers coming from those "key areas".

An official from Shanghai Customs said that passengers on the flight had to be checked because some had transferred from Iran, where more than 7,000 cases and 230 fatalities have been reported.

The woman's behaviour divided opinion on social media.

"Shame on her!" a user of Weibo, China's Twitter-like service, wrote. "It's so shameful for her to act like that in front of foreigners."

"I think the flight attendants were fairly gentlemanly," another user wrote. "She should have been taken away."

A Weibo user who claimed to be on the plane at that time said it was not right for "three men" to subdue the woman.

"I don't want to see my compatriot be bullied," she wrote. "The attendants only stopped their action after two Chinese passengers stood up to intervene."

Shanghai's two airports have tightened medical checks on travellers from overseas, leading to complaints about long waiting times.

Health workers check passengers' temperatures, screen their health disclaimer cards and check their travel histories.

Each passenger arriving from "key areas", where there are a lot of infections, have to have their temperature checked twice after they get off the plane. Some may have to undergo simple physical checks.

Passengers who travelled to those key areas in the past 14 days, no matter their nationality, would be sent to designated places for 14 days of medical observation, authorities said.

The Shanghai Customs official said passengers were disembarked in batches to avoid crowding, making the examination process longer.

She said that after the authorities allocated more than 300 customs staff to support monitoring at border ports at the end of last week, the examination process now took one to two hours.

"Many people blamed us for low speed and low efficiency, but didn't ask why," she said, adding that people's messy handwriting on their health disclaimer cards and poor memory of where they had been in the past 14 days also complicated the clearance process.

"As a citizen, shouldn't they cooperate in this critical moment?" she said. SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST