For local family, bucket-list cruise became nightmare

As they mourn death of one parent, they desperately seek help for another

task before them: helping Toyling Maa, who herself might be sick with the virus, get care and eventually make her way across a largely shuttered nation to her home.

The situation over the past week highlighted yet again how the quick-spreading coronavirus has led to chaos on cruise ships and struck a brutal blow into the hearts and lives of people around the world.

“After the horror we’ve gone through with Wilson, we can’t see that happen again,” Jason Chien, the Maas’ son-in-law, said Sunday, hours before Toyling Maa, 64 was scheduled to be taken to a staging facility to be evaluated.

Such a nightmare scenario was not a consideration when the Maas left on Feb. 29 to spend a week touring Machu Picchu.

Chien said that visiting the famous Inca citadel in Peru had been one of Wilson Maa’s “bucket-list items.”

The Maas and three other couples who were lifelong friends boarded the Coral Princess on March 5 in Chile for a two-week cruise around South America.

The voyage had been scheduled to end March 19 in Buenos Aires after navigating Cape Horn at the southern end of Tierra del Fuego.

But by the time the ship arrived in Argentina, its 1,020 passengers and 878 crew members were greeted by a different world. Many South American countries had closed their borders because of the exploding contagion.

Passengers were not permitted to disembark, and those who had flights home from Buenos Aires were unable to make them, Chien said.

Without many options, the ship’s captain decided to sail to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Princess Cruise officials said.

Chien said family members were not overly concerned at the time because the Coral Princess had not reported any confirmed cases of the coronavirus. But Wilson Maa started feeling sick last week, Chien said, just as the U.S. Coast Guard denied the ship permission to dock at Fort Lauderdale.

At first, family members thought the symptoms were caused by seasickness, Chien said. Then Maa got a fever. On Tuesday, he tested positive, one of seven passengers and five crew members to have confirmed cases of the virus, cruise ship officials reported.

Within days, the ship went into self-isolation, officials said in a statement. Chien said they separated healthy passengers to the upper levels.

The Maas were confined to their cabin.

As the liner made its way to Florida, Chien said, he, his wife, Nancy Maa Chien, and her sister, Julie Maa, began frantically trying to help get the Maas off the ship.

But Wilson Maa remained on board for four days after first showing flu symptoms on Tuesday, the family said. The Coral Princess didn’t get permission to dock until Saturday.

Chien said his fatherin-law needed a ventilator and hospitalization by then. Ship personnel were using a manual ventilator with a hand pump to assist Maa’s breathing.

Chien said the family waited four hours Saturday to get Maa help, being told repeatedly there were no ambulances or hospital beds available, before calling 911.

Wilson Maa was transported by ambulance about 10 p.m. and taken to Larkin Community Hospital in Hialeah, Florida. He died about two hours later.

“His condition deteriorated so quickly,” Chien said of Wilson Maa. “So a four-hour delay of an ambulance is so critical now. That’s why we were so fearful of Nancy’s mom. These delays aren’t acceptable because of the speed of how the conditions change.”

Chien said Sunday afternoon that Toyling Maa, who had not been tested for the coronavirus, was suffering from flu-like symptoms and that the family believes she also may have contracted the virus.

“We are aggressively following up to ensure she gets the medical care she needs,” said Chien, who with his wife lives in San Mateo.

Chien said the family was frustrated because it could not get answers about who was in charge to decide to let his mother-in-law get off the ship.

“There is a lot of red tape or dead ends,” he said. “I don’t know who is coordinating.”

Julie Maa pleaded for help earlier Sunday in Twitter posts that illustrated the toll the situation has taken on loved ones.

“I need to help my mom get to a hospital?” she wrote in one tweet. An hour later, she posted, “Three ambulances drove away and my mom is still on the ship.”

Myriam Marquez, a spokeswoman for MiamiDade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez, said Sunday that at least seven passengers from the ship were being evaluated by Miami-Dade County medical personnel.

She said Toyling Maa was among those being evaluated to see if she needed to be taken to a hospital for treatment.

According to a statement Sunday from Princess Cruises, passengers needed to be screened by officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before leaving the ship.

“This will, unfortunately, result in further delays in disembarkation and onward travel for many guests as we work through this complex, challenging and unfortunate situation,” the statement read.

Through an emotional day worrying about their mother’s health, family members also wanted to pay tribute to Wilson Maa.

“We are so lucky to have a father that was so silly, fun, engineering minded, and thoughtful,” Nancy Maa Chien posted on her Facebook page.

“There are no words for the sorrow we have experienced, but only joy for the memories we had with him.”

Chien said his father-inlaw had a successful engineering career in the Bay Area after graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He said Wilson Maa grew up in San Francisco in a family that ran a dry cleaning business.

“He always loved to tinker,” Chien recalled. “He was kind of a Mr. Fix It.”

Chien said Maa and his wife enjoyed taking their grandchildren to music lessons and taekwondo training.

“The hard part is they left at the end of February before WHO (World Health Organization) declared a pandemic,” Chien said. “It devolved so quickly.”

Restrictions about gathering in the midst of the global outbreak will limit the family’s chance to give Wilson Maa the kind of sendoff he deserved, Chien said.

“If we could have had a regular memorial, there would have been hundreds of people who would have come,” Chien said.