Grand Princess to dock in Oakland as soon as Monday, state officials say

After several days of high seas drama, a vacation cruise ship carrying coronavirus patients will be allowed to dock Monday at the Port of Oakland, where the sickest of the patients will be disembarked and sent to hospitals for treatment, state emergency officials said Sunday.

Passengers from California, regardless of whether they are showing symptoms of COVID-19, will be quarantined at Travis Air Force Base near Fairfield or Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, near San Diego, state emergency services officials said in a statement Sunday morning. Non-California residents will be quarantined elsewhere. The ship’s crew will remain quarantined on the ship, which will leave Oakland’s port.

None of the roughly 2,500 passengers will be released to the general public, state Office of Emergency Services said in the early-morning statement. The Grand Princess will remain at the Oakland port only long enough to unload passengers, they said.

The ill-fated cruise has been held in limbo off the coast of Northern California after 21 of its passengers tested positive for coronavirus, with passengers forced to into isolation in their rooms.

The ship with 3,531 passengers and crew had been on a pleasure cruise to Hawaii. That cruise was halted last week after tests showed a passenger previously on the ship, whose Mexico cruise ended Feb. 21 in San Francisco, had contracted the virus. That man, from Placer County, died in a Sacramento-area hospital on March 4, becoming the first California patient to succumb to the worldwide pandemic.

The ship has become a symbol of the U.S. government’s struggles to grapple with a mounting national and international health crisis caused by the new virus, which first appeared earlier this year in the Hubei province of China.

President Donald Trump added to the confusion on Friday when he said he’d prefer the ship remain offshore. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault,” he said, adding he would defer though to others on the decision to bring the ship in.

In a set of conflicting announcements late Saturday night, the Princess Cruises company first said state and federal officials would allow the ship to dock sometime Sunday at the Port of Oakland. The most-ill passengers would be released for treatment, the company said.

Minutes later, the company announced the plan had been changed, and that the ship would port at an undetermined time on Monday.

“Guests who are California residents will go to a federally operated facility within California for testing and isolation, while non-Californians will be transported by the federal government to facilities in other states,” officials with the cruise line wrote.

In a follow-up statement early Sunday, the governor’s Office of Emergency Services said the ship docking will take place “as soon as” Monday, and confirmed the plan to transport healthy passengers to in- and out-of-state federal facilities for quarantine.

About 1,000 of the ship’s passengers are California residents, the OES said. Passengers from a previous ship, the Diamond Princess, were quarantined at several facilities, including Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, after repatriation flights from Yokohama, Japan.

State officials said Oakland was chosen because it has docking facilities large enough to handle the big cruise ship and because the “location was the easiest to seal off, securely move passengers toward their isolation destinations and protect the safety of the public.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom commended the city of Oakland and Alameda County for their willingness to help.

“They are showing the world what makes our state great — coming to the rescue of thousands of people trapped aboard this ship and helping tackle a national emergency,” the governor said in written remarks Sunday.

The ship’s odyssey has been chronicled in numerous social media posts in recent days, in which passengers lamented being stuck with little information available about when they could exit.

On Friday night, Coast Guard helicopters flew supplies to the ship, which is idling 20 miles off the coast of San Mateo County “for logistical purposes,” according to company officials.

The company, which is operated by Miami-based Carnival, confirmed that “personal protective equipment (PPE), which included gloves and face masks, was delivered to Grand Princess by U.S. Coast Guard helicopter” to supplement supplies already onboard.

The age ranges for the 21 who tested positive are: Three passengers ages 21 to 29 years old; four people who are 30 to 39; six who are 40 to 49; six who are 50 to 59; one who is between 60 and 69; and one between 70 and 79 years old. Only 46 passengers have been tested so far, but all of the passengers will be tested at some point, officials said.

Vice President Mike Pence, who met with cruise executives in Florida on Saturday, said that of the 21 who were infected, 19 are crew members.

At least eight positive tests have been connected to the ship’s previous voyage to Mexico, including a Placer County man who died.

“It’s very likely that the crew on the Grand Princess was exposed on two different outings, and we know the coronavirus manifested among the previous passengers,” Pence said, “and so we will find that out. But we will be testing everyone on the ship. We will be quarantining as necessary. But with regard to the 1,100 member crew, we anticipate that they will be quarantined on the ship, will not need to disembark.”

Where do coronavirus numbers stand?

Coronavirus is spread through contact between people within six feet of each other, especially through coughing and sneezing that expels respiratory droplets that land in the mouths or noses of people nearby. The CDC says it’s possible to catch the disease COVID-19 by touching something that has the virus on it, and then touching your own face, “but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.”

Symptoms of the virus that causes COVID-19 include fever, cough and shortness of breath, which may occur two days to two weeks after exposure. Most develop only mild symptoms, but some people develop more severe symptoms, including pneumonia, which can be fatal. The disease is especially dangerous to the elderly and others with weaker immune systems.

According to the state Department of Public Health website, there were 88 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 1 reported death in California as of Saturday. The total includes 24 patients who were repatriated from Wuhan, China, and the Diamond Princess cruise off of Japan.

A map maintained by Johns Hopkins University, more than 107,000 cases have been reported worldwide, with about 3,600 deaths, the vast majority of them in China. In the U.S., 437 cases have been reported, including 17 deaths, all but three of which have been in Washington state.

The Sacramento region has 10 positive cases: four in Sacramento County, five in Placer County and one in Yolo County. One man, a 71-year-old who was on the Grand Princess last month, was the first Californian to die from COVID-19 last week.

This story was originally published March 8, 2020 at 8:16 AM.