Report: Flying from France to JFK on 10/17/21

I am glad to hear that your test was checked. I flew from Paris to SFO near the end of September and no one looked at my test result.

"They created an instant bottleneck for the hundreds of passengers behind us." Sounds like they were doing their jobs.

Indeed, what Lindy said. It sounds like they were there to check people, so that is what they were doing.

I should clarify my answer, it seems. I was pointing out the COVID test checkpoint based on its odd location. We got off the plane and started walking towards immigration. We walked a few minutes - for us, it’s that time when we’re trying to be as efficient as possible since we don’t know what kind of lines we’ll be facing up at immigration. We’re tired, we’re hauling our bags and we’re focused on immigration. So it was weird that - at about the halfway point, just at the end of a hallway, the hallway itself was blocked by this COVID-test check.

There is no signage or anything, we just saw three women standing up there, and, when we finally got right in front of them, realized they were saying they wanted to see COVID tests. So we stopped to haul them out, a bottleneck of a few hundred people formed behind the first few of us and no one knew why we were all stopping as the location was so odd and unsigned.

Everyone had to stop their focused trek to immigration and then pull out the passport and COVID test that (at least for me) I would normally pull out as I approach immigration.

For me, again, I then put everything away in my neck pouch since I’m not familiar with JFK and I didn’t know how much further we had to walk.

At any rate, I’m not criticizing the checking of the COVID test, but I am warning people that the paperwork check location is very unexpected. Had someone mentioned it to me, I would have made sure all of that paperwork was handy when I exited the plane and so I mention it here to others:)

Thanks for that clarification. Yes, communication at airports is highly desirable!