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U.S. Will Evacuate Americans From Cruise Ship Quarantined in Japan Shifting Ground in Coronavirus Fight: U.S. Will Evacuate Americans From Cruise Ship
(about 1 hour later)
YOKOHAMA, Japan — The United States will evacuate Americans from the cruise ship that has been quarantined for more than a week in Japan because of coronavirus infections on board, the United States Embassy in Tokyo said on Saturday. For much of this past week, as a dangerous viral outbreak continued to rattle the world, officials seemed keen to offer reassurances. Chinese leaders ordered people to get back to work. American officials said they saw no need to evacuate citizens from a quarantined cruise ship in Japan.
A chartered flight will arrive on Sunday for those who want to return to the United States, according to a letter from the embassy emailed to American passengers and crew members. Hundreds of Americans are on the ship. In a sign of how unpredictable the crisis still is, and how quickly officials have had to adapt their responses, both of those declarations had at least partly unraveled by Saturday.
“We recognize this has been a stressful experience, and we remain dedicated to providing all the support we can and seeing you safely and expeditiously reunited with family and friends in the United States,” the letter read. Communist Party leaders said people returning to the Chinese capital would have to isolate themselves for two weeks, potentially delaying any economic revival. American officials announced that they would charter a flight to evacuate American citizens from the cruise ship, after citing heightened danger to those on board.
[Read the latest updates on the coronavirus outbreak here. ] The shifting policies underscore the rapidly evolving terrain of one of the most serious global public health crises in recent years, even as China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said this past week that the crisis was improving. The outbreak has been marked by confusion and conflicting analysis of the available information.
The ship, the Diamond Princess, was placed under quarantine at the city of Yokohama early last week, with about 3,700 passengers and crew members aboard, after the coronavirus was diagnosed in a man who had disembarked in Hong Kong. The number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus disease, named COVID-19, continued to climb on Saturday and their geographic locations to spread. The virus claimed its first life outside Asia when an 80-year-old Chinese tourist died in France, according to the French health minister. It was the fourth death outside mainland China.
Since then, at least 285 coronavirus cases have been confirmed aboard the 17-deck luxury ship — including 67 announced on Saturday, the most reported in a single day since the quarantine began. A day earlier, the outbreak also reached Africa for the first time, with Egypt reporting the continent’s first confirmed case.
Many passengers have expressed fear that the quarantine, meant to protect Japan and keep the virus from spreading, was putting them at risk. Experts have said that infections could have spread aboard the ship despite measures taken to isolate people. On Saturday morning, the Chinese authorities reported 2,641 new cases and 143 deaths in the previous 24 hours. In all, more than 66,000 infections and 1,523 deaths have been confirmed.
The embassy said buses would move Americans and their belongings from the ship to the chartered plane on Sunday, and that evacuees would be screened for symptoms before boarding. The plane will land at Travis Air Force Base in California, with some passengers continuing onward to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. The American Embassy in Tokyo, explaining the evacuation decision to American citizens on board the cruise ship on Saturday, acknowledged the rapid changes. “This is a dynamic situation,” the embassy said in an emailed letter.
The evacuated Americans will then have to undergo two weeks of additional quarantine. “We understand this is frustrating and an adjustment, but these measures are consistent with the careful policies we have instituted to limit the potential spread of the disease,” the letter read. The ship, the Diamond Princess, has been quarantined for more than a week at the port of Yokohama, after the coronavirus was diagnosed in a man who had disembarked days earlier in Hong Kong. About 3,700 passengers and crew members were aboard when the quarantine was imposed, including more than 400 Americans.
That news dismayed some of the Americans on the ship. Linda Tsukamoto, a retired retail manager from Marina del Rey, Calif., noted that the State Department had previously said there would be no secondary quarantine.
She said she was considering turning down the embassy’s offer and waiting for the original quarantine period to expire. “I don’t want to break quarantine so I can go to a cold barracks to end up quarantined again,” she said.
Updated Feb. 10, 2020Updated Feb. 10, 2020
The embassy said those who chose not to take the flight would be “unable to return to the United States for a period of time,” though it did not specify how long, saying the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would decide the timeline. For days, United States officials had assured American passengers that evacuation was not necessary, even as more than 200 cases were diagnosed on board. On Feb. 8, the embassy told American passengers in a letter that “remaining in your room on the ship is the safest option to minimize your risk of infection.”
Symptomatic Americans who cannot board the flight will remain in Japan for care, the embassy said. At least 40 Americans have already been taken off the ship after testing positive for the virus. But Saturday’s letter made clear that the calculus had changed.
The Wall Street Journal first reported that the government was preparing to evacuate Americans. “To fulfill our government’s responsibilities to U.S. citizens,” the letter said, the U.S. government recommended “that U.S. citizens disembark and return to the United States.” Passengers who did not leave on the charter flight would not be able to return to the United States “for a period of time,” it added.
Japan has more confirmed coronavirus cases — the vast majority from the Diamond Princess — than any country outside China, where the outbreak began, and it reported its first death from the virus on Thursday. American officials also said previously that the American passengers would not have to be quarantined upon their return to the United States. But the embassy’s email on Saturday said the evacuees would need to be quarantined for two more weeks once they arrived.
On Friday, the Japanese government said an official who had helped transfer infected patients from the cruise ship had tested positive for the virus. A Health Ministry official who had been tending to passengers on board also tested positive. On Saturday, the government announced 11 other cases that it said were not connected to the cruise ship. While the letter did not explicitly give a reason for the change, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested on Friday that new information had emerged. “The data coming out of Japan suggests there’s a higher risk among the people on the ship,” the official, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, said during a news briefing.
At a news briefing on Friday, an official with the C.D.C., Dr. Nancy Messonnier, said officials were discussing a plan to help the Americans on the Diamond Princess. Officials were “concerned that the data coming out of Japan suggests there’s a higher risk among the people on the ship, and therefore their safety is of utmost importance,” she said. Sixty-seven new cases were announced aboard the ship on Saturday, the most in a single day since the quarantine began.
The ship’s quarantine period was originally set to expire on Wednesday, but there were indications Saturday that at least some departures might be delayed. The American government’s announcement seemed to trigger a chain reaction among other countries. Minutes after the United States Embassy’s letter was sent, the Australian Embassy in Tokyo sent its own email to its citizens aboard the Diamond Princess, citing the American evacuation plans and assuring Australians that it was “examining options.”
An onboard announcement said a new testing process might begin on Tuesday, under which it would take at least three days for results to come back. It also said that passengers who had come into close contact with someone who tested positive, like a cabin mate, might have to restart their quarantine from the day the contact ended. The Italian foreign minister also said on Saturday the country would do what was necessary “to protect our citizens” aboard the ship.
In the hours before the embassy announced the evacuation plan, Americans were waiting anxiously for confirmation of news reports about it. One said the ship felt like a “pressure cooker.” Within China, a flurry of new announcements reinforced the government’s continuing efforts to recalibrate its balance of economic and public health concerns.
Sarah Arana, a medical social worker from Paso Robles, Calif., said Americans were particularly worried about the extra quarantine period in the United States. “If you add two weeks and we have to miss work, what does that mean for us?” she asked. The mandatory two-week self-quarantine for people returning to Beijing was announced late on Friday evening on the website of Chinese state-run television. Millions of migrant workers who power China’s economy had left urban centers to celebrate the Lunar New Year holiday last month.
But Ms. Arana, a grandmother of two, said she was prepared to submit to it, out of concern that the virus had spread on the ship since the quarantine was imposed. Those who did not comply with the rules would “be held accountable according to law,” according to a text of the order released by state television.
“If we can prevent this from spreading any further, then I am OK and I will go sit in a military base for two weeks so I don’t become a superspreader,” she said. “I feel like I have some civic responsibility.” But the policy, issued by Communist Party officials at the municipal level, seemed at odds with the message from Chinese national officials this past week. They had ordered local officials to get businesses up and running again, and to help factories eliminate bureaucratic hurdles.
Ms. Tsukamoto was more inclined to stay on the ship, where she said quarantine had been “like going through an emergency in a five-star hotel.” Mr. Xi, at a meeting of the Communist Party’s top leadership on Wednesday, said government officials at all levels should “strive to achieve this year’s economic and social development goals and tasks,” according to a summary of his remarks by state media.
Watching the sun set over Yokohama Bay from her balcony, she said, “My view from Travis Air Force Base will not be like this.” After the Beijing restrictions were announced, some on Chinese social media observed that workers had already been streaming back to the capital for days, and they wondered how effective the new rules would be.
Eimi Yamamitsu contributed reporting from Yokohama and Makiko Inoue from Tokyo. It was not the first time that Chinese officials had sent mixed signals about their desire to get people back to work. The same day that a top economic official urged factories to restart, a national health official said that the return of workers to major cities could foster new outbreaks in populous provinces with high populations of migrant factory workers.
In another possible hurdle to economic revival, a top Chinese banking official said on Saturday that commercial banks must disinfect and stash any cash they collect before releasing it back to customers.
Behind it all is uncertainty, and increasing diplomatic tension, about the scope of the outbreak.
While the World Health Organization has praised China’s response to the crisis, American officials in recent days have privately expressed doubts about whether China is underreporting cases, as well as about the official timeline for the first infections.
Chinese officials have been adamant that they have been transparent. On Friday, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, attacked what he called some countries’ “overreaction” to the outbreak.
“We have the confidence, capability and determination to prevail over the virus at an early date,” Mr. Wang said in an interview with Reuters.
Still, the Chinese authorities have acknowledged the difficulty in knowing the outbreak’s precise scale. On Thursday, officials added more than 14,800 new cases to the tally of those infected, the largest one-day increase recorded so far. They attributed the jump to a change in the way they diagnosed confirmed cases.
The United States will also widen its search for possible infections: American health officials in five cities will begin testing some people with flulike symptoms for the coronavirus, according to Dr. Messonnier of the C.D.C.
The constant changes have left people caught in the middle of the outbreak confused and frustrated.
Rachel Torres, 24, a newlywed on the cruise ship quarantined in Japan, said that she and her husband, Tyler, would take the evacuation flight, though they were frustrated that it had not been offered earlier.
Gay Courter, 75, an American novelist from Crystal River, Fla., near Tampa, said she and her husband, Philip, would also leave the ship despite the unexpected quarantine period.
“This is what we’ve been asking for, because we never felt quarantine on this ship was safe,” she said.
Elian Peltier, Edward Wong and Elaine Yu contributed reporting. Claire Fu contributed research.