It’s difficult to say how the reports of 100 sick passengers originated, but it’s not hard to see why. Being stuck on a plane already inspires a mix of impotence and rage. Add something to fear—an overheard cough, a suspicious number of trips to the bathroom—and imagining the worst is all too easy. One passenger told NY1 that “well over half” of the passengers in the main cabin were sick. She said she’d asked the flight attendant for a face mask but didn’t get one, so she spent the flight with a blanket over her head.

Medical emergencies at 40,000 feet

Sick people on planes are, unfortunately, not an uncommon presence. On one particularly hellish flight in 2013, 26 passengers—all from the same tour group—had a “mass-vomiting episode” while aboard a 13-hour flight from Chile to Australia. The airline said the passengers had come aboard already sick, likely with a highly contagious norovirus that causes vomiting and diarrhea. The 26 of them had to share eight airplane bathrooms. When the flight finally landed in Australia, 16 people went to the hospital, three of them on stretchers.

During the Ebola outbreak in 2014, the CDC recommended that health-care workers who had been exposed to the virus take only private flights out of caution. (The virus is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids.) When one nurse later diagnosed with Ebola flew on a Frontier flight, her plane was decontaminated three times. The CDC director also chastised her in a press conference.

A week before that happened, a man on a flight leaving Philadelphia reportedly sneezed and said, “I have Ebola, you are all screwed.” The remark triggered a whole procedure: Passengers could not leave while officials in blue hazmat suits boarded the plane to investigate.

It was a joke. He didn’t have Ebola. It was just the ordinary nightmare of flying, where hell is other people.