“NEGATIVE! Me, son, husband, mom and dad! Thank you Lord for protecting us… So emotional now,” passenger Yardley Wong tweeted from the Diamond Princess on Wednesday, February 19, 2020. She had spent two weeks shut in a cabin with her six-year-old son.
About 500 passengers who tested negative walked off the ship that day in Yokohama, ending a quarantine that Japan had been widely criticised for. Some boarded buses to train stations, others climbed into taxis and vanished into the city. Japanese soldiers helped escort a few, including an elderly man in a wheelchair wearing a mask. Those still in their cabins waved goodbye from balconies.
“I’m a bit concerned if I’m OK to get off the ship, but it was getting very difficult physically,” a 77-year-old man from Saitama told Kyodo News as he left with his wife. “For now, we just want to celebrate.”
Relief, and a worry about stigma
Each person with a clean test and no symptoms had their temperature checked and received a certificate confirming the result and the end of quarantine. That paper may matter at home. Masao Sumida, 84, from Chiba, told NHK he feared neighbours would shy away from him. “I know I tested negative, but I’m afraid people may try to stay away from me,” he said.
Health Minister Katsunobu Kato first said that passengers with negative tests had met the quarantine requirement and could take public transport home. After meeting experts later in the day he changed tack and asked them to avoid non-essential outings and stay home for about two weeks. Mitsuo Kaku, a professor at Tohoku University, said on NHK that the risk from people who had tested negative was low but still called for ample precautions.
A quarantine under fire
The outbreak aboard did not stop with the quarantine. Authorities announced 79 more cases that day, taking the total on the ship to 621 among the 3,711 people who had been on board. It was the largest cluster of infections outside China, where the death toll had passed 2,000 and more than 74,000 people were infected, according to AFP.
Kentaro Iwata, an infectious disease professor at Kobe University, called the on-ship quarantine a “major failure, a mistake”. The National Institute of Infectious Diseases said that crew members could not be fully isolated because they had to work, and that late increases came mostly among crew or passengers who shared cabins. Four health workers who helped with the quarantine became infected.
About 2,000 more passengers were due to leave over the next three days. Foreign governments were making their own plans: South Korea flew home six of its citizens and a Japanese relative that Wednesday, and Canada, Australia, Italy and Hong Kong sent chartered flights for others.
Sources
- HAMA, Japan – About 500 passengers left the cruise ship Diamond Princess on Wednesday at the end of a much-criticized two-week quarantine aboard the vessel, docked in Japan, that failed to stop the spread of the new virus among passengers and crew.
- Passengers leave Japan virus ship as China toll tops 2,000 – World – The Jakarta Post
Sources
- Quarantined passengers disembark from virus-hit ship in Japan
- Coronavirus: Americans disembark from virus-hit… | The Straits Times
