CORONAVIRUS FROM CRUISE SHIP MAY CAUSE ISSUES
The cruise ship had been shunned at port after port for fear it might carry the coronavirus, but when the Westerdam arrived in Cambodia on Thursday, the prime minister greeted its passengers with flowers.
Health officials are trying to determine how big of a problem they have from a ship that arrived in Cambodia.
Amid assurances that the ship was disease free, hundreds of elated passengers disembarked. Some went sightseeing, visiting beaches and restaurants and getting massages. Others traveled on to destinations around the world.
One, however, did not make it much farther than the thermal scanners at the Kuala Lumpur airport in Malaysia. The passenger, an American, was stopped on Saturday, and later tested positive for the coronavirus.
On Sunday, with passengers already headed for destinations on at least three continents, health officials were scrambling to determine how big of a problem they now have — and how to stop it from getting bigger.
“We anticipated glitches, but I have to tell you I didn’t anticipate one of this magnitude,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
With more than 1,000 passengers from the Westerdam headed for home, Schaffner said, it may be harder than ever to keep the coronavirus outbreak contained to China.
“This could be a turning point,” he said. Mainland China on Monday reported an increase by 105 in deaths caused by the illness for a total of 1,770 since the outbreak began, The Associated Press reported.
It is unclear how well the passengers were screened before they were allowed off the ship. But the best approach to containing a broader spread of the virus from the Westerdam would be to track down all of the passengers and quarantine them for two weeks, experts said.
It won’t be easy.
Dr. Peter Rabinowitz, co-director of the MetaCenter for Pandemic Preparedness and Global Health Security at University of Washington, said the episode would test the limits of contact tracing, the method used to track down people exposed to infection.
“It’s really daunting to control a situation like this now that people have gone all over the world,” Rabinowitz said.
More than 140 passengers from the ship flew to Malaysia, and all but the U.S. woman who tested positive and her husband were eventually allowed to continue on to their destinations, including the United States, the Netherlands and Australia, officials said. More 1,000 other passengers took charter flights to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and were in various stages of transit home, the cruise line said.
In Cambodia, the cruise line found a country whose leader, closely allied with Chinese officials, has cast doubts on the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak, which has infected some 68,000 people in China.
“Is there any Cambodian or foreigner in Cambodia who has died of the disease?” Prime Minister Hun Sen said earlier this month. “The real disease happening in Cambodia right now is the disease of fear.”
And on Friday, President Donald Trump tweeted his thanks to Cambodia for allowing the ship, more than 600 of whose passengers were Americans, to dock.
But by opening his arms to Westerdam, Hun Sen may have put his own citizens at risk.
As of Sunday, 233 passengers and 747 crew members were still on the ship docked at Sihanoukville, Cambodia, Holland America said. After Malaysia’s announcement that a passenger was infected, the remaining passengers and crew members were restricted to the ship, and buses that had been scheduled to transport them remained parked nearby.
It was unclear whether Cambodia would seek to quarantine passengers who are still in the country, or whether those who had left by plane would face quarantine in their own countries upon arrival.