Cruise ship passengers Diamond Princess have reached the end of their two-week quarantine coronavirus on Monday, and while some were allowed to return home, others did not know when they would be released.
Two passengers who were quarantined at the University of Nebraska medical center were allowed to go home on Monday, and two others were released on Sunday. The 140 passengers who were quarantined at Travis Air Force Base in California were released on Monday, said Rachel Brinegar, a spokesperson for the base.
Meanwhile, more than 120 passengers who were on the ship were also due to be released Monday from Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. However, a woman who had been exposed to the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was released from the base by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when she had no symptoms, but was returned to the base when a test has shown to be positive for coronavirus.
On Monday, the mayor of San Antonio, Ron Nirenberg, declared a local public health emergency demanding that passengers from Diamond Princess and evacuees from Wuhan quarantined in Lackland remain there. Nirenberg said at a press conference on Monday that cruise ship passengers should be retested before being released.
Addressing reporters in Austin Monday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott
described the CDC’s actions in Lackland as “unacceptable” and “a case of negligence”.
The CDC was to hold a media availability by Monday noon, but abruptly canceled it without explanation.
Passengers on the Diamond Princess were in limbo for almost a month. Most of them spent two weeks in quarantine on the ship while it was docked in a Japanese port. About 300 were evacuated before the end of this quarantine on two planes chartered by the United States Department of State.
Of these, 14 passengers tested positive for the coronavirus immediately before takeoff. Rather than isolating them, federal officials made the controversial decision to board them on the two evacuation planes with passengers who tested negative. There are currently 45 confirmed American cases out of more than 700 total cases of cruise ship coronavirus.
The Diamond Princess evacuees were primarily sent to military bases in Lackland and Travis for a two-week quarantine. Others have been sent to the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which has a highly specialized infectious disease containment unit. Patients were sent to the Ebola virus epidemic in 2014.
Washington state reported Monday that six people have died, and the number of infections and deaths is likely to change as more people are tested.
“The numbers keep going up and up,” said Jeffrey Gold, chancellor of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, on Monday at a press conference. “The more we test, the more we find.”
Worldwide, the number of cases exceeded 90,000 on Monday, with more than 3,000 deaths, most of them in China. South Korea, Iran, Italy and Japan have the highest number of coronavirus cases outside of China.
In Nebraska, a total of 15 Diamond Princess passengers were brought to Omaha for treatment or observation. Two of them were released on Sunday and two others on Monday.
Jerri Seratti-Goldman, one of two Diamond Princess passengers scheduled to return home on Monday, said she had a negative test, but her husband Carl has been hospitalized with coronavirus since February 17 and will remain there . She said he started having a fever during the evacuation flight, “out of the blue”.
“I should do a happy dance,” said Seratti-Goldman at a press conference before returning to Santa Clarita, California. “I was not doing a happy dance. It was a sad dance.”
Likewise, Joanne Kirkland of Knoxville, Tennessee has also tested negative and will be able to return home, but not her husband.
Speaking at the press conference, Kirkland said she feared the reaction of members of her community.
“Will my friends run away from me? Will they run away from us?” she asked. “It concerns me, but we will make the most of it.”
