Briton among victims as panic spreads on ship
Passengers face weeks in quarantine on cruise liner where 61 people have been diagnosed with virus
‘We need to find a way to break that vicious cycle and find a way of organising the patients on board so we can get people off the ship in due course’
PANIC was spreading on a cruise ship struck by the coronavirus yesterday as the World Health Organisation said passengers may be stuck on board for weeks.
Sixty-one guests on the Diamond Princess – including a British man on honeymoon – have been diagnosed with the virus, turning the ship into a hub of the disease that has so far killed more than 640 people.
The World Health Organisation called the situation “very, very scary”, noting that the 14-day quarantine was currently restarting every time a new case is discovered on board.
Many of the 3,700 passengers said they had been given little information about how long they would be stuck on the ship, off the coast of Japan.
“We are scared, I don’t want to leave this ship in a box,” one passenger from Florida said.
Others warned of shortages of medication, and said they were being forced to endure cramped and inhospitable conditions.
Dr Michael Ryan, executive director at the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, said: “At the moment every time there’s a new case the quarantine extends 14 days, so we need to find a way to break that vicious cycle and find a way of organising the patients on board in a way that we can get people off the ship in due course.”
“It’s quite scary – very, very scary to be in that situation.”
Alan Steele, from Wolverhampton, was yesterday taken off the Diamond Princess for hospital treatment in Japan. He is the second UK national to be diagnosed with coronavirus.
His wife, Wendy, who remains on board, said she was “counting down the days” to see him again.
The newlyweds embarked on the cruise last month, since when they had posted pictures from the Kagashimo volcano on Japan’s Kyushu island, the dragon bridge in Danang, Vietnam, and the Chiang Kai Shek memorial in Taiwan, before the crisis emerged. A businessman from Brighton who had recently flown back from Singapore was the first Briton to test positive for the virus.
American newlyweds Milena Basso and Gaetano Cerullo, also on their honeymoon, are among thousands confined to their cabins on the Diamond Princess.
“We should be quarantined in a sanitary environment that’s safe, not on a cruise ship that’s already infected,” said Ms Basso.
In a video, and wearing a face mask, she appealed to President Donald Trump to “save us”. She said: “Get us a government-based airplane. Get us off the ship.”
Other passengers said some of those on board “worked themselves up into a frenzy” amid growing cabin fever. One described a “sense of dread” at learning that thermometers will be distributed to all cabins, along with face masks.
Yesterday sick passengers on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship containing “isolated” Chinese nationals were being tested for coronavirus after it docked in New York. And a cruise liner from Hong Kong has been left “sailing in circles” in the South China Sea after being refused entry by several countries.
Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, said the spread of the virus on board the ships was “a very concerning development –
in part because cruise liners tend to contain large numbers of passengers many of whom are quite elderly”.
“They come from all over the world and disperse back all over the world at the end so I think this is an area that needs to be considered quite soon.”
But Prof Hunter said travel restrictions will probably be “no longer of any value” if the spread to neighbouring countries continues.
In the UK, health officials are trying to trace anyone who came into contact with the Brighton man, who was diagnosed with the virus on Thursday. They have not named him, but he is understood to be in his 40s or 50s and had attended a conference at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Singapore, organised by a UK company called Servomex.
He is now being treated at an infectious diseases unit at Guy’s Hospital, while his partner and children have voluntarily gone to stay somewhere more secluded as a precaution.