San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
VIRUS IS TIGHTENING GRIP ON DAILY LIFE GLOBALLY
Cruise ship passengers off California coast in limbo; infections swell across U.S.
The coronavirus tightened its grip on day-to-day life around the world on Saturday as ports in several countries turned back ships with infected passengers, cases across the U.S. continued to climb, and Italy’s government locked down much of the country’s north.
In the U.S., the death toll from the virus climbed to 19, with all but three of the victims in Washington state. The number of infections swelled to more than 400, and Pennsylvania, Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska and Kansas reported their first cases.
In California, state authorities were working with federal officials to bring the 951-foot Grand Princess cruise ship to a non-commercial port and test those aboard.
Cruise officials and passengers confined to their rooms on the ship off the San Francisco coast voiced mounting frustration as the weekend wore on with no direction from authorities on where to go after 21 people on board tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
Vice President Mike Pence said at a Saturday meeting with cruise line executives in Florida that officials were still working on a plan.
Pence on Saturday targeted travel advice to older people with serious health problems.
“If you’re a senior citizen with a serious underlying health condition, this would be a good time to practice common sense and to avoid activities including traveling on a cruise line,” Pence said, adding they were looking to cruise line officials for action, guidance and flexibility with those passengers.
Meanwhile, at the Long Beach harbor Saturday, passengers aboard the Carnival Panorama cruise ship were not allowed off the vessel while officials dealt with a “medical matter,” according to a Facebook post by the cruise director.
Long Beach city officials said on Twitter that a passenger aboard the cruise was taken to a hospital and is being tested for the coronavirus. According to the cruise director, the passenger did not meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s criteria for coronavirus risk.
The ship is docked at a Long Beach terminal, but “in an abundance of caution, (the CDC) has decided to hold passengers on board until the patient can be evaluated,” the city of Long Beach account tweeted.
And in Washington state, the number of deaths linked to coronavirus reached 16, officials said Saturday, but even more might be attributed based on figures released by the nursing home at the center of the outbreak.
The Life Care Center nursing home in Kirkland said Saturday that since Feb. 19, 26 residents have died.
Most of them died at hospitals, where they were tested: 13 of 15 who died at hospitals had the new coronavirus. But 11 died at the nursing home, and Life Care said it had no information about post-mortem tests to see whether any of them were infected.
In its statement Saturday, Life Care said 70 of its 180 employees have shown COVID-19 symptoms and are no longer working.
Cases of coronavirus were also hitting the Washington, D.C., area Saturday, but President Donald Trump said he wasn’t concerned that the virus was getting closer to the White House.
District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser said Saturday that testing at the public health lab of the D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences yielded its first presumptive positive coronavirus case.
On Friday, the political group AIPAC said two people who attended its Washington conference this past week had tested positive for coronavirus.
And Maryland officials warned Saturday that a person who attended the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in the suburb of Oxon Hill had tested positive for the virus. Both Trump and Pence spoke at the conference, but the White House said there was no indication that either was in close proximity to the infected attendee.
Asked if he was concerned about the virus getting closer, Trump said: “No, I’m not concerned at all . ... We’ve done a great job.”
Around the world, more countries were bracing for an increase in virus cases.
Italy’s government on Saturday took the extraordinary step of locking down much of the country’s north, restricting movement for about 16 million people in regions that serve as the country’s economic engine, including Milan and Venice.
The move is tantamount to sacrificing the Italian economy in the short term to save it from the ravages of the virus in the long term.
“We are facing an emergency, a national emergency,” Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said in announcing the government decree in a news conference after 2 a.m. today.
He called the measures “very rigorous” but necessary to contain the contagion and ease the burden on Italy’s strained health care system.
By Saturday, Italy had more than 5,800 cases of the virus, 233 of them fatal, with increases of almost 800 infections and 49 deaths from the day before.
Only China has had more people die after contracting the virus.
Meanwhile, passenger-packed cruise ships elsewhere in the world confronted their own virus problems.
In Egypt, a cruise ship on the Nile with more than 150 aboard was under quarantine in the southern city of Luxor after 12 positive tests.
Also Saturday, the port of Penang in Malaysia turned away the cruise ship Costa Fortuna because 64 of the 2,000 aboard are from Italy. The ship had already been rejected by Thailand, and is now heading to Singapore.
And in Malta, which reported its first case of the virus Saturday, the MSC Opera ship agreed not to enter the Mediterranean country’s port amid local worries — even though there were no infections suspected on board.
While the global death toll has risen past 3,400, more people have now recovered from the virus than are sickened by it.
As of Saturday, nearly 90,000 cases have been reported in Asia; more than 8,000 in Europe; 6,000 in the Mideast; about 450 in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, and fewer than 50 cases reported so far in Africa.
In Iran, fears over the virus and the government’s waning credibility has become a major challenge to leaders already reeling from American sanctions. More than 1,000 infections were confirmed overnight, bringing the country’s total to 5,823 cases, including 145 deaths.
The government declared a “sacred jihad” against the virus: Wearing gas masks and waterproof fatigues, members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard sprayed down streets and hospitals with disinfectants.
Countries outside Asia stepped up efforts to control the outbreak.
Spain deployed police to enforce a quarantine. Austria confiscated 21,000 disposable masks that a Turkish company smuggled aboard a tour bus, seeking to profit from soaring demand.
Turkish police, meanwhile, threatened legal action against social media accounts accused of spreading false virus information.