Fear on the Diamond Princess
After Rebecca was diagnosed, Kent says no one came to disinfect the room the couple shared. He believes it is only a matter of time before he is diagnosed with the virus, too. "(But) you roll with the punches and try to make the best of things as you can," he said.
Information from the cruise staff has been scant and he only found out that a further 41 passengers had been diagnosed with the virus after talking to a reporter, he said.
“The only way anybody knows (what is happening) is when people that are infected tell other people they’ve been infected,” he said.
American author Gay Courter is also among the more than 2,600 passengers trapped on board the Diamond Princess, which she described as a “contaminated prison.”
“(My husband Philip and I) are 75 and 77 years old, we have health risks and we are a bad category to get sick … We are not safe in our rooms,” she said.
In an attempt to escape the infection, Courter said she had contacted her insurance company, Medjet, which is willing to send a crisis extraction team from the boat to evacuate her.
The US and Japanese governments, however, won’t allow that to happen. Japanese health officials told CNN that any passengers of the Diamond Princess had to go through the quarantine process before they were allowed onto land and that the process was ongoing.
“We can be taken in quarantine, and extracted in quarantine and arrive in the United States safely,” she said. “We are not sick at the moment but there is a major concern that circulating air on this ship can make people sick.”
Courter said the US government could take them to the nearby Okinawa military base for evacuation, telling President Donald Trump that he could have another thousand US coronavirus cases on his hands if the ship wasn’t emptied.
“This was a trip of a lifetime, and I used all of my credit card points. The way out was divine but right now I do not mind how I go home,” she said.
Courter is afraid that if she becomes infected she may not survive. Older people are especially susceptible to the Wuhan coronavirus – China’s National Health Commission said Tuesday that 80% of all fatalities in mainland China were over the age of 60.
“I (just) do not want to go home in a box,” she said.