all passengers would need to stay in their
rooms until further notice. “I called my
mom in tears, like, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t
stay in this room the whole time.’ I was
just really scared about the uncertainty of it
all,” she said. “I wasn’t scared for myself.
I’m healthy, I’m young. I figured if I got it I
would be able to recover. But I was scared
for my grandparents, and I felt a lot of
pressure to protect them from it.”
The ship was delayed off the coast of San
Francisco while officials hatched a plan. In
a dramatic scene, U.S. Coast Guard helicop-
ters dropped tests onto the Grand Princess.
Of the 45 tested, 19 crew members and two
passengers would test positive for the virus,
and about 100 passengers showed
symptoms. Meals were delivered to
rooms individually—but prepared and
served by crew members who shared
space for accommodations and meals,
a system that health experts said was
one of the reasons why the quarantine
of passengers within a cruise ship’s
close quarters is ineffective.
Meanwhile, as the Grand Princess
idled offshore, Trump publicly
expressed reluctance to bring the ship
home. “I like the numbers where they
are,” the president said. “I don’t need
to have the numbers double because
of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”
“They were in shock,” Chalik said of the
Weissbergers’ reaction to comments from
the president. “They actually like a lot of
what Donald Trump has to say, and here
he’s talking about them like they’re just
numbers. They’re not numbers—they’re my
kids’ grandparents.”
As they waited just off the coast, passengers
took to social media to share their quaran-
tine horror stories. One man complained
he was going hungry because the ship was
rationing food. A family of eight started an
Instagram account about the hair-pulling
endeavor of trying to occupy six small chil-
dren for days in a tiny, windowless cabin.
Michelle Heckert, who said she did her best
to strike a positive tone, playing music with
a ukulele and releasing videos on Twitter,
tweeted the day’s in-cabin entertainment:
an instructional video on how to make
paper airplanes.
The Grand Princess was finally given the
green light to return to shore, but it would
dock in Oakland, not San Francisco.
Officials said Oakland’s outer harbor put it
at safer remove from tourists and densely
populated areas.
To many in Oakland, a city that’s long
lived in its glitzier neighbor’s shadow, the
Grand Princess’ docking reopened old
The last word^37
wounds, fanning long-standing tensions
steeped in racial and environmental dis-
crimination. “There’s a feeling, particularly
among people of color in this city, that
things keep happening to us and not for
us,” Oakland activist Cat Brooks told
The Guardian. “When something like this
[cruise ship] happens, that allows for a
breeding ground of hysteria and mistrust.”
But the news was more than welcome
to those on board the Grand Princess.
Cars honked, passengers whooped and
cheered as the boat passed underneath San
Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate bridge. “We
knew we were headed toward shore,” said
Rex Lawson, 86, who was traveling withboarded a bus and sat close to others who
might be infected. Many were still untested
days after arriving at an Air Force base for
quarantine.
Denise Morse, a Davis, Calif., resident, filed
a complaint last week through her congress-
man, John Garamendi, claiming that safety
protocols have been disregarded. “We’re
an incubator for Covid-19,” she said from
her room on Travis Air Force Base, where
she was surrounded by a containment fence
and under guard 24 hours a day.
Morse said that when she first arrived at
the base she noticed passengers crammed
together as they lined up for food and
grabbed condiments out of shared
bins. There were no hand-washing
stations available in the food areas,
and the passengers had to serve them-
selves coffee using their bare hands
on the coffee dispenser, she said.
On March 10, the day the Grand
Princess first reached Oakland, pas-
sengers received an official document
under their cabin doors that read:
“Once you arrive at the military
installation, you may choose to be
tested for Covid-19.” But Morse
said that when she and her husband
asked to be tested for the coronavirus
on Thursday, they were told no tests
were available.
“They are not testing us. On the ship
they gave us a paper that said we would
be tested. When we got here (three days
ago), they took our temperatures instead,”
Morse said. Heckert, also quarantined at
Travis Air Force Base, said last week that
her family hadn’t been tested either.
Only after Congressman Garamendi
took her complaint to the Department of
Health and Human Services did the staff
began delivering food to passenger’s rooms
instead of having them line up to grab plas-
tic boxes from tall stacks.
“We were better off on the ship,” Morse
said, adding that cruise ship staff, at least,
left food outside their door.
For Rex Lawson, the experience hasn’t
soured his travel plans forever. His children
told him he’s never going on another cruise,
but he said it’s hard pass up the free trip
Princess Cruises has offered him and his
wife. “I don’t say never,” Lawson said.
But he might be out a partner. He asked
Mardell if they might use the free ticket in
the future. She’d told him that next time,
he’d have to go by himself.This story was originally published in The
Guardian. Copyright Guardian News &
Media Ltd 2020.After docking, passengers faced a shortage of Covid-19 tests.his wife, Mardell, 81. “Everybody was very
happy when we pulled under the bridge,
they were out on their balcony, yelling and
clapping.”
The worst, it seemed, was over. But still to
overcome was the colossal task of moving
thousands of passengers, an untold number
of whom had been infected, off the boat
and onto buses, where they’d be trans-
ported to hospitals, hotels, or military bases
for 14 days of quarantine.
On Monday morning, just before the
Grand Princess pulled in, trucks rumbled
to and from the docks along the shore-
line like any other day. Four large private
passenger buses waited to transport the
possibly infected passengers. Passengers dis-
embarked by order of priority, those with
acute medical needs first. Officials said
it could take up to three days to unload
everybody. But in fact it took five days—
and even longer for 14 international pas-
sengers waiting for transportation to their
home countries.A
FTER THE SHIP docked, complaints
quickly started mounting from
passengers concerned that recom-
mended quarantine protocols weren’t being
followed. Passengers were in close contact
with others as they unloaded the ship. They