Inside ‘nightmare’ of Diamond Princess evacuees
Tug-of-war between S.A. officials and feds left many in a lurch
SAN ANTONIO — By 6:15 a.m., Terri Feil and her husband, Dave, had showered, packed and passed their temperature screenings with flying colors. They were itching to leave when there was a knock on the door.
Personnel outfitted in protective gear were delivering their breakfasts — a signal that their departure was not going as planned.
“No, no, no,” the Feils protested. “We’re leaving today.”
Just following orders, the workers said, and left.
“My husband and I look at each other, and we went, ‘Oh no, oh no,’” Feil said. “There is something wrong.”
After two weeks under quarantine in a modest hotel room at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, the Feils would be marooned for yet another day.
Terri, 64, and Dave, 69, had been away from their home in Houston for about two months. Their cruise on the Diamond Princess was disrupted by an outbreak of the new coronavirus, which spread among the thousands of people on board. Confined for days on the ship while it was docked in Japan, they were eventually evacuated with 142 other Americans to Lackland.
Unlike a dozen others in their group, neither had developed symptoms of the virus. When Monday came, their scheduled departure day, they thought they would finally be free.
But they would be among more than 100 evacuees swept up in a intense battle between local officials and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC team in charge of the quarantine, having determined the group was healthy, was prepared to let the evacuees go March 2, as indicated on their federal orders. By then, local officials had lost confidence in the agency.
Two days before the Diamond Princess quarantine was to lift, the CDC had released an earlier evacuee who had been infected with the coronavirus and appeared recovered, but was later found to still have the virus in her system.
Furious, city and county officials insisted that the former cruise passengers should stay put Monday until they could be retested for the virus, in the event that they, too, could still pose a risk to others.
With the clock ticking, they mounted an all-out offensive: declaring public health emergencies in San Antonio and Bexar County, then seeking a court order to temporarily block the evacuees from leaving the base, a move that failed. In the end, local officials didn’t have the authority to force their will on the federal agency.
By the time the ordeal was over, some of the evacuees were upset with the CDC for not immediately disclosing what had happened with the other evacuee and how it might affect their departure. Others were frustrated with the local officials who, in their minds, had needlessly extended their confinement. No matter where they directed their ire, all could agree that they were drawn into a situation that was larger than themselves.
For Terri Feil, the scenario felt like something out of the movie “Groundhog Day.”
“It’s just a nightmare that you keep waking up to,” she said.
‘Ready to go’
The day before, Terri Feil said, everything appeared “105 percent ready to go.”
About 4 p.m. Sunday, March 1, the Feils and the other evacuees used their government-issued cellphones to dial into a conference call with the CDC team charged with their care, part of the daily routine to get information and ask questions about their quarantine.
During the call, officials talked about preparations for their release the next day, which had been dubbed “Operation Return Home.” According to a packet distributed to the group, a final round of temperature checks would begin at 6 a.m., and those who had been medically cleared would receive a green wristband and a document rescinding their quarantine. A flow chart indicated a series of stations the evacuees would visit before boarding buses that would take them off the base.
There was no mention of the chain of events that had unfolded just hours earlier.
About 2 a.m., an ambulance modified for infectious disease control had been dispatched to a Holiday Inn Express near the airport. Emergency responders were to pick up a guest, a woman had been evacuated to Lackland in early February from Wuhan, China.
The woman was the first person in San Antonio — and the only one in her evacuee group of 91 — to test positive for the coronavirus. She’d been hospitalized since Feb. 11, but even after she was no longer symptomatic, the virus continued to circulate in her body for an unusually long period of time. When she was retested, her swabs came back negative on Feb. 21 and 25 and she had been deemed safe for release, according to the CDC criteria at the time. She’d left the Texas Center for Infectious Disease on the afternoon of Saturday, Feb. 29.
Later that evening, the results came back from a third set of samples, this time showing she still harbored low levels of the virus. By then, the woman had come into contact with at least 21 people at the hospital and the hotel, along with an unknown number of people at North Star Mall, where she’d gone for about two hours to eat and shop.
It wasn’t clear whether she was infectious. Still, in the middle of the night, she was quietly returned to isolation at the hospital.
By Sunday morning, officials with San Antonio and Bexar County had learned what happened. They would spend the rest of the day discussing what to do next.
Based on what happened with this patient, they wondered, how were they to know something couldn’t go wrong with the other evacuees?
Meetup at the mall
Back at Lackland, Terri Feil just wanted to know the specifics of how they would get home.
Throughout Sunday, she kept asking the federal team coordinating their departure one question: Where could those who lived locally and weren’t flying home be picked up?
Because their home is so close, it didn’t make sense for the Feils to get on a plane. Their 45-yearold son, David, a police officer in Houston, planned to drive to San Antonio to take them home himself.
The handout they’d been given just said: “Local Drop Off: After 10:00 am. Location provided to individuals.” Feil needed to tell him where to meet, but all the responses to her queries seemed evasive.
“No matter how many times we asked, they said that information would be forthcoming, that they did not want it leaked to the press,” Feil said.
About 4:45 p.m. Sunday, the text came through: The drop-off point was 7400 San Pedro — an entrance to North Star Mall near the Cheesecake Factory.
Feil, a retired IRS agent, and her husband, who has a military background, were perplexed. Wouldn’t it be conspicuous to take people weighed down by multiple large suitcases to a mall?
At the time, they had no idea it was also the very same public place where the Wuhan evacuee had gone a day earlier.
Nonetheless, by the time they went to bed that night, their minds were at ease. As far as they knew, they would be sleeping in their own beds the next day.
Watching, waiting
Linda Levell, 71, and her husband, Jim, 72, also awakened early Monday in preparation for their trip back to Vincennes, Ind.
If the delivery of breakfast was a warning sign, what came next was confirmation of their fears. During a conference call about 8:30 a.m., the evacuees were told that for the time being, their release was on hold.
That morning, local officials had begun raising questions with the CDC about the safety of allowing the evacuees to disperse into the community.
About 10 a.m., Mayor Ron Nirenberg and other local officials held a news conference that outlined the weekend’s events. Some evacuees watched from their rooms. Nirenberg lambasted the CDC for its “screwup” and said he’d do everything in his power — he didn’t specify how — to ensure the Diamond Princess passengers were not released until they were retested.
Hours passed, and anxiety mounted.
Still wearing masks, some evacuees filtered out to the parking lot outside the hotel complex, forming a line with their suitcases along the curb.
The Levells’ room was situated at the back of the hotel, so they couldn’t see the parking lot from their windows. By late morning, their friends, who were housed at the front, told them the buses had left.
“We were all very frustrated and wondered what was going on,” said Levell, a retired kindergarten teacher.
As the day progressed, Feil said she felt “sadder and sadder.” The couple, having put it off as long as they could, called their son to tell him. He was already close to Sealy, about 50 miles west of Houston.
Still, he insisted on getting to San Antonio, even with the release very much in question. He returned home, packed an overnight bag and got back on the highway. He checked into a hotel about five miles from the base, planning to wait there as long as necessary.
Seeking a ‘flee to freedom’
Other evacuees, including Levell, were making their own calls to state and federal officials and journalists, in a bid to “expedite our flee to freedom.”
Some of their pleas were heard by members of San Antonio’s congressional delegation, who in the early afternoon got on the phone with the CDC, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department and attorneys with the federal government. Those on the call knew that some evacuees had retained their own lawyers and were considering suing the government for unlawfully holding them against their will.
The federal lawyers seemed to agree that the evacuees had a point — they were asymptomatic and many had already tested negative for the virus. The quarantine orders specified 14 days. Legally, it appeared the federal government did not have grounds to hold them for longer.
Officials in San Antonio were forging ahead with their own plans.
By early afternoon, the mayor’s office had issued the public health emergency declaration, which would allow the Metropolitan Health District to compel quarantine and isolation of the public, and even take over private property for such efforts if necessary. It banned the movement of any evacuees through the city.
A few hours later, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff declared a similar emergency. About that same time, the evacuees were directed to once again dial into a conference call. It was with Rear Adm. Nancy Knight, leader of the CDC’s Division of Global Health Protection and the person in charge of the Diamond Princess quarantine at Lackland.
One evacuee, who sounded frustrated, asked why Knight had not explained the situation with the Wuhan evacuee earlier.
Levell thought Knight “answered with great knowledge and great grace, as she always did.” If anyone wanted to know about the Wuhan evacuee, Levell figured, they could simply turn on the TV.
“The CDC was trying to negotiate with the government. When you’re in a situation like that, you tell the people you’re representing what they need to know,” Levell said.
Terri Feil, who had indeed found out via the media, had a different viewpoint. Like Levell, she thought the CDC had taken good care of them — until that point. “All of that good went to hell in a hand basket,” Feil said.
“When you are dishonest with people, you lose everything. You lose all confidence in them,” she said. “If they had told us, if they had given us a clue, instead of making us feel like, what did we do, what did we do wrong?”
Carol Williams, a CDC spokeswoman, would later say the evacuees were given updates about what was “a rapidly evolving situation.”
Throughout Monday, the city of San Antonio continued to push for an extension of the quarantine. In federal court, they attempted to obtain a temporary restraining order to prevent the evacuees from leaving.
The effort was shot down by a U.S. district judge, who wrote in his order that while he shared the concerns raised by city officials, he had no authority to overrule the CDC’s quarantine criteria.
Local officials also had no jurisdiction to go onto federal property.
A welcome knock
That evening, many of the evacuees were drained from the interminable stress of the day. Resigned, Feil had already changed into her pajamas when, about 9:15 p.m., there was a loud knock at the door.
It was man holding two manila envelopes. He asked whether they were listening to the third conference call of the day.
“I have here in these envelopes your releases from this facility,” Terri Feil remembers him saying.
Feil said she “went ballistic,” jumping up and down in excitement. She and her husband dialed into the call and heard the comments about how they couldn’t be confined any longer.
Levell remembers Knight saying she was hopeful they could leave the next day without being stopped by city officials. If people wanted to leave that night, they could be picked up at one of Lackland’s gates.
The Feils opted to leave immediately. They got into the car with their son around midnight and arrived at home in Houston about 3:30 a.m.
The Levells didn’t leave until the next day. When they walked past the chain link fence surrounding the hotel, Levell was touched when the federal team burst into applause — the same gesture as when they first arrived.
As soon as they were through airport security, the Levells headed to a bar for Bloody Marys.
‘Political pawns’
The evacuees’ arrival had been similarly chaotic and politicized when some of the American passengers from the ship tested positive for the virus just as they were being evacuated.
To Levell, what happened with their departure from Lackland was an overreaction by local officials. Unlike the Wuhan evacuee, they’d never been sick.
“There was a lot of hysteria over that,” she said. “That didn’t have anything to do with us. We were totally different. We felt like we were being political pawns. There’s no question about that.”
She also was upset to hear local and state officials criticize the CDC employees, who had “just had been our advocates for two weeks.”
In the short time Levell was quarantined, the virus had already reached across the country , killing at least 19 people as of Saturday.
If the virus becomes more widespread, Levell would not fear the prospect of quarantining again, this time at home. There, she would have access to her family and other comforts.
No matter what comes next, she said, their lives will never be the same.