Cruise ship, floating symbol of America’s fear of coronavirus, docks in Oakland

The Grand Princess, the cruise ship stranded for days on the high seas off California, sailed into the Port of Oakland on Monday, met by workers in protective gear who marshalled a large-scale quarantine operation for 21 people on board infected with the coronavirus, along with the thousands of other passengers and crew members.

For a harbour with a storied history of shipbuilding during the Second World War, this was a moment of humility in the San Francisco Bay. The ship came over the past week to symbolise both the nation’s fear of the disease and the conflicting political signals that have governed the response.

“We are so relieved,” said Cookie Clark, a retired realtor whose vacation to Hawaii ended on live television as the cruise ship steaming under the Golden Gate Bridge was broadcast around the world. “Floating around was so stressful.”

On a sun-soaked morning, Clark and her husband joined other passengers on their balconies, waving toward shore as two large tugboats helped guide the vessel through the narrow shipping lane that runs past Alcatraz Island and the skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco. A harbour pilot who had boarded the vessel wearing biologic protective gear navigated the boat at high tide through the bay.

In recent days, as the cruise ship turned in circles 10 miles off the coast of San Francisco, its more than 2,400 passengers have followed the tension and public squabbling over their fate.

President Donald Trump said last week that he would prefer the ship dock elsewhere because it would otherwise increase the number of coronavirus cases in the United States. And on Friday, before anyone on the ship was notified, passengers learned from watching Vice President Mike Pence on live television that people on board had tested positive for the virus.

At a news conference at the White House on Monday, Trump and Pence sought to reassure the country. “We are going to handle it and we have been handling it very well,” Trump said.

“It’s not our country’s fault,” the president added. “This was something we were thrown into.”

Of the cruise ship, Pence said the 21 people confirmed with the virus had been taken from the ship and put in “proper isolation.”

The transfer of passengers was to continue through Monday and Tuesday and would be done in “very, very carefully controlled environments,” he said.

With only 45 people on board tested so far, the number of infections seemed very likely to rise.

Some residents of Oakland have expressed resentment that their city had been chosen for the ship to dock. The Grand Princess was originally scheduled to arrive at the cruise ship terminal in wealthier San Francisco across the Bay.

“I think it’s a total disgrace to my family, to all the taxpayers, to the rest of the people who don’t have a voice,” said Michael Green, 38, riding a bicycle through his West Oakland community.

Green said he was not sold on the authorities’ assurances that they were whisking passengers from the cruise ship away to quarantine on military bases.

“All it takes is one to escape,” he said.

Yet even as the authorities promised ample precautions for the new arrivals, the virus was already well established in the San Francisco Bay Area, a hot spot in the United States.

Health officials in Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley, reported the county’s first death from the virus on Monday. San Francisco reported five new cases, bringing the total in the city to 13. And in Southern California, the number of confirmed infections increased to 16, with two new cases announced.

Gov Gavin Newsom said on Sunday that he expected the number of reported cases to rise as testing became widely available.

He said Oakland had been chosen for the cruise ship’s disembarkation because it was logistically convenient, near the Oakland airport, where foreign passengers will depart on charter flights home. It is also about one hour away from Travis Air Force Base, where many of the passengers were scheduled to be taken on Monday for a 14-day quarantine.

Most of the California residents on the ship, who make up about 40% of the passengers, will be sent to Travis, where evacuees from Wuhan, China, the origin of the outbreak, were quarantined last month. Other Californians will be sent to a base outside San Diego.

Residents of other states would most likely complete their mandatory quarantine at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas or Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Georgia, the Defence Department said.

The authorities said it could take two to three days to offload all the passengers from the ship.

Passengers began disembarking into an 11-acre containment area on Monday, where they were being triaged. Those showing signs of acute illness were to be brought to medical facilities.

The spread of the virus aboard the ship is another blow for the cruise industry after last month’s debacle of the Diamond Princess in Japan. The cruise liner quarantined in the port of Yokohama became a case study in how quickly coronavirus can spread aboard a ship and the difficulties of conducting an onboard quarantine. More than 700 people who were on the ship became infected, and eight people died.

The spread of infection on both ships also raises questions about the health and safety of crew members, many of whom hail from poorer countries. While all passengers on the Grand Princess will disembark, most of the crew members will remain on the ship, which will leave the San Francisco Bay within around three days, Pence said on Monday.

“The remaining people on the ship — the crew itself — will push off from the dock and they will be quarantined and observed and treated shipboard,” Pence said.

Grant Tarling, the chief medical officer of the company, said over the weekend that the company believed that the virus was brought aboard the Grand Princess by a passenger on a previous cruise. Tarling said he believed that the passenger infected crew members, spreading coronavirus more widely in the ship.

“We believe his illness was community acquired in California before he joined the ship,” Tarling said of the passenger, who had boarded his cruise on Feb 11 and disembarked Feb 21. He was from Placer County in California.

The company made the assessment judging by the date that the patient had fallen ill, around two or three days after boarding the ship, Tarling said.

One of the crew members who tested positive for the virus on Friday was the waiter who had served the ill passenger for the entire cruise. Two of the passenger’s travel companions also tested positive.

Denise Stoneham, a passenger on the Grand Princess, was relieved when she heard the ship would be docking at the Port of Oakland on Monday. But, as she scrolled through social media, Stoneham, a code enforcement officer from Novato, California, became more distressed. People in Oakland were posting that they did not want the ship to dock there.

“It just makes me angry that people are putting a label on us,” said Stoneham, 52. “We’re human beings, we want to come home. We’re not an infestation that’s coming to their city.”

As passengers passed their final hours on board before the planned start of disembarkation, some replayed in their minds the interactions they had with crew members who may have been infected by the coronavirus.

On Michele Smith’s first night on the cruise, on Feb 21, an old friend, one of the Grand Princess crew members, came up her to her and her husband and gave them a big hug and kiss and shook their hands.

They snapped a photo with the crew member, named Amado, and every night over the next week, would give him a hug and a kiss.

“They probably don’t get many hugs on the cruise, and people need love,” Smith said. “I just wanted to let him know we cared about him.”

A week later, on Tuesday, Amado was not in the dining hall. When the Smiths asked other servers what had happened to him, one looked hesitant and then said he thought it was Amado’s night off. Another said Amado had come down with allergies.

“That was my first ‘uh-oh,’” Smith, 57, said. “How do you get allergies in the middle of the ocean?” That was the last time they saw Amado.

On Friday night, the Smiths, sitting on the bed in their room, learned from television news that 19 of the 21 people who had tested positive for coronavirus were crew members. Michele Smith said she felt sick with worry — her stomach hurt, her chest hurt.

“Now it gets crazy. Now it gets real,” her husband said.

“Up until now, it didn’t feel real,” his wife added. “You just think, no, it can’t be us.”

c.2020 The New York Times Company