PANIC GRIPS ‘DEATH SENTENCE’ CRUISE
As a second passenger dies, panic grips 142 desperate Britons trapped on cruise liner that California won’t allow to dock
FEARS were last night growing for British tourists trapped aboard a virus-hit cruise ship stranded off the coast of San Francisco.
Relatives of some of the 3,500 people on board the quarantined Grand Princess – which has been dubbed an ‘incubator for infection’– have called for the liner to be evacuated as ‘keeping people on board will be a death sentence’.
Neil Hanlon from Bridgwater, Somerset, one of the 142 Britons on the ship, said conditions were ‘like a prison’ and ‘very scary’.
The Grand Princess was quarantined after it was discovered that a 71-year-old man had died of coronavirus after returning home from an earlier cruise on the vessel. And last night it emerged a second former passenger, a 75-year-old Californian man, had also died.
Mr Hanlon, who had been on a 15-day cruise around the Hawaiian islands with his wife Victoria, said: ‘There are some very ill passengers on board which is scary. We were in the lift with them which probably wasn’t a good thing. They were going down to where the medical centre was. Their breathing was horrendous.’ The Grand Princess has been in limbo after 21 people on board tested positive for the virus and it was denied permission to dock in San Francisco.
US Coast Guard airlifted a sick passenger off on Friday night as authorities scrambled to find a ‘safe’ military base to allow the ship to dock. US VicePresident Mike Pence later said it had been directed to an undisclosed ‘non-commercial port’. Passengers will then face being kept in isolation for 14 days before being allowed home.
Those on board have complained about being kept in the dark. One unnamed passenger told NBC News: ‘They have told us nothing. We are finding out the news from the television and social media. It’s disgusting. Lives are at risk.’
Last month passengers on the Diamond Princess, a sister ship, were left stranded off Japan. Seven people, including a British man, died and more than 700 of the 3,700 passengers became infected in what health officials called ‘ an unmitigated disaster.’
Horrified passengers aboard the Grand Princess only learned about their coronavirus outbreak when Mr Pence announced the positive tests at a press conference on Friday.
Jackie Bissell from Dartford, Kent, who is on the cruise to celebrate her 70th birthday, claimed the ship’s British captain John Harry Smith appeared as ill-informed as the passengers. ‘We are waiting for information from the captain but I think he’s as much in the dark as we are. He’s said he’s giving us information as and when he gets it,’ she said, adding that passengers have been told to stay in their cabins.
Lisa Egan, from San Francisco, said her 90-year-old father Cliff was expected to run out of life-saving medication last night. She said: ‘The ship is like an incubator for infection. Keeping people on the ship is going to be a death sentence for many of the elderly passengers.’
Epidemiologist Don Milton said the recirculated air from the ship’s ventilation system plus the close quarters could lead to disaster. ‘You’re going to amplify the infection by keeping people on the boat. They need to get them off and into a safer quarantine environment.’
Passenger Kailee Ott, 17, said she and her mother, Leeann Higgins, learned about the outbreak while watching CNN. Another American passenger, Debbie Loftus, slammed President Donald Trump for saying people were being kept on board to prevent the US figures for the infection from rising.
Norma Philip, from Scotland, found a comic way to ‘celebrate’ her quarantine, posting a picture on social media of her husband Andy wearing a scuba mask and holding two bottles of Corona beer with the caption: ‘We came prepared.’
Last night, Princess Cruises said ‘every effort’ was being made to get passengers off the ship.