A flight attendant is suing for wrongful death, alleging that after she got COVID-19 at a mandatory training and then transmitted it to her husband who died a month later from the virus.
Carol Madden, 69, flies for Southwest Airlines. She’s based out of the Baltimore/Washington area. She and her husband William were married for 35 years and had known each other since they were 17.
According to her attorney Dan Mastromarco, Madden attended the training session on July 13, 2020.
"There's a lot of intimate handling of various materials that flight attendants have to use, of course, they're training them for safety precautions during flights," Mastromarco told NBC Bay Area. "They have to handle placards, they have hooded face masks from time to time, they have to handle door handles, they have to shout, sometimes scream, various safety measures, they have to handle test dummies."
Mastromarco claims that Madden was exposed to the coronavirus during the training because safety precautions weren’t taken -- mask-wearing wasn’t enforced, temperatures weren’t taken, no health screenings were done, surfaces weren’t properly cleaned, and there wasn’t adherence to social distancing practices.
“The promises that they make, to make sure that the customers feel safe on their flights were certainly not practiced with respect to their own family of employees that were present that day," Mastromarco told NBC.
"Throughout the entire training session, Southwest utterly failed to implement the most basic precautions to safeguard the health and well-being of the Flight Attendant Trainees from the inception of the training through contact tracing,” the lawsuit reads.
Madden believes she caught the virus from someone in her training group who posted on Facebook that they had contracted COVID-19.
"What's most astonishing about this is that Mrs. Madden actually learned that the individual sitting within four feet of her during the entire training session had COVID-19 from Facebook," Mastromarco said.
According to the suit, Madden's husband picked her up from the training to head back home to York, Pennsylvania. Within a matter of days, Madden began to feel ill, and her symptoms got more severe.
The couple was tested for COVID-19 the same day Madden saw the Facebook post about one of the trainees in her group saying they had the virus.
"They did not practice the requisite contact tracing that I believe they should have done, which would have alerted Mrs. Madden early on to the fact that she had been exposed to COVID-19. She did not have to wonder if this was a common cold that she had or that was transmitted to her husband," Mastromarco alleges.
Although Madden recovered her husband did not, and two weeks after they both tested positive, the 73-year-old had COVID pneumonia and died alone on Aug. 12, 2020.
"In a statement to NBC DFW, Southwest Airlines said, the safety and well-being of its employees and customers "has been our uncompromising priority" since the beginning of the pandemic and extended "our sincere sympathy to Ms. Madden."
"Southwest has taken enhanced measures to clean and maintain our aircraft, airports, and work centers and follows all notification guidelines in accordance with the CDC," the statement read. "Additionally, the Southwest Team works each day to ensure that our multi-layered approach to supporting our Employee and Customer safety stays current with research findings and public health recommendations. Southwest will continue our dedicated efforts to support our People and communities as we collectively work together to slow the spread of COVID-19 during the ongoing pandemic."