DALLAS _ A Spirit Airlines employee performed CPR on an unconscious Dallas woman during a July flight that made an emergency landing in New Mexico, where the woman was pronounced dead.
The woman's death was later determined to have been caused by COVID-19, and Dallas County officials included her in their daily tally of coronavirus cases and deaths Sunday.
Police reports obtained Wednesday by The Dallas Morning News offer more details about the incident than had previously been released.
Officers were sent to Gate B7 at the Albuquerque International Sunport the night of July 24 after learning of an inbound flight with a medical emergency _ a 38-year-old woman who was unconscious and not breathing.
Spirit Flight 208, headed from Las Vegas to DFW International Airport, landed at the Albuquerque airport a little more than an hour into its scheduled 2{-hour duration, according to the flight-tracking service FlightAware.
Firefighters and medical personnel from a nearby Air Force base went aboard and took over CPR. A crew member had performed CPR during the flight but had passed out from exhaustion, police wrote in an incident report.
First responders then placed the woman on a cloth gurney and moved her onto the jetway, where they continued trying to revive her.
After several minutes, they determined that she appeared to be "beyond medical help" and ended their life-saving measures, police wrote. The woman was officially pronounced dead on the jetway about an hour later.
Police took several photographs of the woman, who was lying on her back, but did not collect any other evidence.
A police document indicates the woman had complained of shortness of breath on the flight. It remains unclear whether she knew she had contracted the coronavirus; local health officials said she had underlying high-risk health conditions.
An autopsy report, completed in late September, found that the woman died of COVID-19, with asthma and morbid obesity as contributing factors. According to the report, her inhaler did not relieve her shortness of breath, and she had been given oxygen during the flight.
A spokeswoman for New Mexico's Office of the Medical Investigator said she was tested for the virus because of health information received during the office's investigation.
A relative listed in police records as the woman's next of kin couldn't be reached by phone Wednesday.
In an emailed statement, a Spirit representative offered condolences to the woman's family and friends. Spokesman Erik Hofmeyer said the airline's flight attendants are trained to react to in-flight medical emergencies and have access to medical kits and personal protective equipment.
Hofmeyer said the flight attendants from that flight quarantined afterward "out of an abundance of caution," and that they all tested negative for the coronavirus.
Dallas County officials had initially said a Garland woman had died July 25 before takeoff on a flight from Arizona to Dallas, but they later said the woman was a Dallas resident who died in New Mexico. An Albuquerque airport spokeswoman clarified some details of the case Tuesday.
Asked again Wednesday about the discrepancy between the two accounts, a Dallas County spokeswoman said she could not comment on details provided by another agency.
It's unclear whether contact tracing was performed in the woman's case and which agency would have handled it.
A representative of Nevada's health department on Tuesday deferred to the Southern Nevada Health District, but a spokeswoman there said that she didn't know about the case and that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would investigate a COVID-19 case that involves air travel. The CDC didn't respond to a request for information.
New Mexico's health department had not responded to questions about the case, and a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services said that agency wasn't involved.
