Birthday surprise for woman in quarantine
Sarah Arana’s birthday party this year was going to be an elegant and intimate affair.
Instead, she was given a surprise serenade by a joyful quartet of medics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine at Travis Air Force Base — dressed in protective masks, face shields and surgical gloves — who sang, laughed, strummed guitar and delivered a box of decorated cupcakes.
“When they started singing, I started crying,” said Arana, 53, who had dinner reservations on Thursday night for a 17-course meal at a trendy Los Angeles sushi supper club but now finds herself holed up in a military hotel to prevent the possible spread of coronavirus.
“It was just such an amazing gesture,” said Arana, a medical social worker, who remains in good health.
It’s her third week of a long and lonely quarantine — 12 days at dock in Yokohama, Japan, on the ill-fated Diamond Princess cruise ship, then another 14 days at the Fairfield air base — that is America’s only tool to fend off a growing international outbreak.
Health officials Friday confirmed two new cases of the respiratory disease in California as the number of infections being treated in the U.S. climbed sharply with the repatriation of American evacuees from the ship.
The newest California cases involved a person in Sacramento County and one in Humboldt County. Sacramento County Public Health on Friday confirmed its first case is an adult resident of the county who had traveled to China and developed symptoms after returning home on Feb. 2.
The California health department is monitoring an estimated 7,600 people who have been asked to self-quarantine and monitor their health at home after recent travel to China. They are also being asked to limit contact with others.
There are now 34 coronavirus cases in the U.S. Those include 11 people who got sick after traveling in China and two others who caught the disease from those travelers. Also sick are three people who were evacuated to the U.S. from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak originated, and 18 others flown back from the Diamond Princess cruise ship.
Meanwhile, the outbreak shows dangerous signs of spreading far beyond China, as new cases were reported on Friday in the Middle East and Europe and large clusters emerged around Asia.
Iran acknowledged 18 cases in three cities, with four fatalities. In South Korea, the number of cases jumped from 30 on Monday to 204 by Friday. Italy had
no cases on Friday morning. By afternoon, it reported 16.
The U.S. is braced for more cases, said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, at a Friday news conference.
“We never expected we would catch every single traveler from China given the nature of the virus and how it spreads,” she warned. “That would be impossible.”
Among the passengers in the cramped quarters of the Diamond Princess and their subsequent evacuation, there has been “significant spread and a high risk of infection,” she said, “and we do expect to see additional confirmatory cases among passengers.”
Arana is a resilient soul. She is a medical social worker in Paso Robles and also manager of the Emergency Services Department at Burning Man, running a 150-person camp of medical volunteers in the hot, dusty and remote high desert.
She has training in infection
control and knows the value of a positive attitude, so has devoted her confinement to doing art projects, posting cheerful updates on Facebook and joining others on well-spaced laps around the buildings. She corresponds by email with people from Beijing and Singapore to France, Brazil and Poland.
But she’s frustrated by the insistence of CDC authorities to send all infected people to a hospital — even if they’re asymptomatic and safely quarantined at Travis.
She and others at Travis are refusing to be tested for the virus until the CDC changes its protocol, because they say that travel and hospitalization is unnecessary and boosts the risk of exposure to others.
So she woke up on her birthday Thursday feeling sad.
She shares the day with her son and looked forward to their special dinner at Sushi Bar, an eightseat theatrical restaurant in Encino with a hidden entrance, mood lighting and servings of raw kusshi oyster, Italian sturgeon caviar,
king salmon, smoked albacore and slivers of fresh tuna glazed in savory soy and fresh grated wasabi.
“It was a hard day,” she said. “I turned everything off and just sat in silence for a while. Just complete and total silence.”
Then there was a knock on the door. It was the team who comes twice a day to take her temperature, but this time, they told her to come outside.
“My heart dropped. I thought I was in trouble,” she said in an interview. “They never ask me to come outside. ‘Oh, my God,’ I thought, ‘I’m being loaded up and taken off.’ ”
As she stepped outside, she was greeted with a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday!” The CDC team also gave her a dozen cupcakes — vanilla, topped by colorful sprinkles — and an electronic solitaire game.
Later there was another knock on her door. It was a guy in a golf cart — also garbed in protective gear — delivering more than two dozen gifts from family, friends and generous strangers.
There were boxes of tea, to replenish her dwindling supply. And there were art projects galore: watercolors, sketch pads, embroidery projects, ink pens, coloring books and more.
“This was a birthday I’ll remember for the rest of my life,” she said. “I feel so supported by amazing, loving people, like I am being held up by the universe, carried by a thousand warm and loving hands.
“People are rooting for us,” she said, “saying ‘We’re there with you. Stay healthy. You can do this!’ ”
As cases accelerate and the virus extends its global reach, she watches for any aches and pains, saddened that more than 600 of her 3,700 fellow ship passengers and crew members have tested positive for the virus and two have died in Japan.
“At the end of the day, we are all the same, with the same fears about the virus,” she said. “We’re all standing together in a circle, holding each other up.”