Cruise Ship Afflicted With Coronavirus Docks in Oakland Harbor

Passengers waved from their balconies as two large tugboats, aided by rubber dinghies from the Oakland Police Department, guided the vessel into the harbor.

Several dozen portable toilets and hand-washing stations were laid out along the dock. The authorities said it could take two to three days to offload all the passengers from the ship, which had been stranded off the coast of California for days as the White House, federal agencies, the California governor and local leaders debated where it should be allowed to come ashore, if at all.

Passengers were to disembark over the next hours and days into an 11-acre containment area, where they will be triaged and, in the case of American passengers, be dispatched to military bases for quarantine.

Twenty-one people aboard the ship have tested positive for the coronavirus, but the true figure may be larger. Only 45 of those on board were tested last week out of the more than 2,400 passengers and 1,100 crew members.

In recent days, as the cruise ship turned in circles 10 miles off the coast of San Francisco, passengers followed the squabbling over their fate. President Donald Trump said he would prefer that the ship not be allowed to dock in the United States because the arrival of infected passengers would increase the number of cases tallied in the country.

Residents of Oakland said they resented that their city had been chosen for the ship to dock — it was originally set to arrive in wealthier San Francisco.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Sunday that Oakland had been chosen because it was logistically convenient, near the Oakland airport, where foreign passengers will depart on charter flights home.

Most of the California residents on the ship, who make up about 40% of the passengers, will be sent by bus for a 14-day quarantine at Travis Air Force Base, where evacuees from China were quarantined last month. Other Californians will be sent to a base outside San Diego.

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

The spread of the virus aboard the ship is another blow for the cruise industry, coming after the 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 onboard the ship, which will leave the San Francisco Bay within around three days, Princess Cruises said in a statement.

“Plans for a crew quarantine are still being determined,” the company said.

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

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

“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.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

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 interaction they had with crew members who may have been infected by 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,’” Michele Smith, 57, said. “How do you get allergies in the middle of the ocean?” That was the last time they saw Amado.

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

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.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .