Delta Air Lines on Dec. 15 will begin asking travelers arriving from outside of the U.S. for data to assist in contact tracing efforts, the carrier announced.
Both U.S. residents and visitors arriving in the U.S. as a final destination will be asked to provide their full name, email address, address in the U.S. and primary and secondary phone numbers. Submitting the data will be voluntary, although it will be required of passengers participating in its Covid-tested flights arriving from Rome later this month.
Currently, if a passenger is found to have been on a Delta flight while contagious, Delta provides a manifest to the CDC to identify passengers who were sitting by the infected passenger, and the CDC passes on that information to the relevant local health department. Having the contact data will speed up the process of getting in touch with that passenger, according to Delta.
Delta said it will send the data to the CDC using the same channels for which it provides data to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and that it would keep the data "for no longer than is necessary to achieve the contact tracing and public health follow-up objectives."
This report originally appeared in Business Travel News.