SAN JOSE, Calif. — Two former passengers of the Grand Princess cruise ship have died, as the number of positive coronavirus cases among those who were on board continues to rise. And a San Jose man said a close female relative, also from San Jose, received a positive test result Thursday after being released from quarantine at Travis Air Force Base.
The Department of Health and Human Services said two men infected on board died earlier this week “due to complications from the coronavirus.” The victims had been taken, along with nearly 1,000 of the other 3,400 passengers and crew, to quarantine at the air base in Fairfield. Each man was transported to a nearby medical facility when he began to show COVID-19 symptoms.
The first man died Saturday and the second on Monday, two days later. Both were in their 60s.
An HHS spokesman said the staff was “deeply saddened” and wished “heartfelt condolences to both families.” Both HHS and Princess Cruise Lines offered to provide grief support to the families.
The Grand Princess set sail from San Francisco on Feb. 21 for a 15-day Hawaiian Islands cruise. Less than two weeks later, a man from the previous voyage died after showing symptoms of COVID-19, trapping the passengers and crew on board until officials were able to devise a plan to bring the ship to land.
When the ship finally docked in Oakland on March 9, 1,103 people on board chose to be tested for the respiratory illness. In an updated count provided by HHS on Thursday, 103 had tested positive and 699 negative. There were 301 tests outstanding.
On Thursday, a San Jose man said his close relative, a San Jose woman, received a positive coronavirus test result Thursday — after she was released from quarantine at Travis before her result was available.
“You cannot believe the number of people she’s been in contact with” since her release, said Del Crawford, 87. The woman, contacted Thursday by The Mercury News, declined to speak about the test result.
Crawford said the woman was picked up from Travis on Tuesday by her son-in-law, whose wife is a San Francisco Bay Area nurse who makes home visits to elderly people.
HHS did not immediately provide answers to questions about the reported infection.
Crawford’s relative, when returning home from quarantine, was welcomed by a number of family members, he said. “They had a big sign up there, ‘Welcome Home,’ ” he said. “Thank God we didn’t go over to the house the night she was released, but the rest of the family did.”
Another former Grand Princess passenger, Jacqueline Baker of Los Gatos, who was quarantined at Travis and released Monday after 14 days before her test result came back, said she was informed Thursday in a phone call from HHS that her result had come back negative. But neither she nor her friend who she’d gone on the cruise with had been told by authorities to self-isolate after release from quarantine, she said.
Baker, 56, said she was not surprised to hear the San Jose woman reportedly received a positive result after being released. The quarantine was flawed, with people allowed to line up closely together for meals and eat at small tables for the first three days after she arrived at Travis, and she saw a group of six or eight people playing bocce with an egg and fruit just before she was released, she said. “Is it possible that someone got infected in the quarantine? Absolutely,” Baker said.
During quarantine, passengers were discouraged from being tested, Baker said. “Everyone should have been tested either when we got off the ship or during the first 48 hours of quarantine so you’re not sending people out into the public with this great unknown,” Baker said.
University of California, Berkeley epidemiologist Art Reingold said he didn’t have enough information to evaluate how well the Travis quarantine and the release from quarantine were conducted. In general, Reingold said, “If we do have somebody who might have been exposed or who is infected, we do want them to self-isolate.”
Health and Human Services, asked how many, if any, of the 103 passengers who so far have tested positive for the virus received the results after being released from quarantine, did not provide an answer by The Mercury News’ deadline. How many people out of the 300 remaining passengers who were tested, and whose test results were still pending Thursday, had been released was also not answered, nor was a question about the reported ineffectiveness of the quarantine. The agency also did not say by deadline whether released passengers were told to self-isolate.
Earlier this month, when the Grand Princess was stranded in the San Francisco Bay, officials uncovered 21 cases in 43 tests, with Vice President Mike Pence announcing the results at a news conference before passengers on board were informed.
Officials said people leaving quarantine have been screened with one final temperature check before leaving the base.
———
©2020 The Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)
Visit The Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) at www.mercurynews.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.