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Post by Admin on Mar 8, 2020 21:19:32 GMT
A cruise ship, which has lingered in limbo for days off the California coast with 21 people testing positive for the virus, is finally being allowed to dock.
"Grand Princess will proceed to the Port of Oakland on Sunday to begin disembarking guests who require acute medical treatment and hospitalization," the cruise line tweeted.
Among the 3,000 people on board, others will be allowed to disembark on Monday and will face testing and quarantine in federal facilities. Crew members will be treated and quarantined on board the ship, officials said.
On Saturday, Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C., announced the first presumptive positive coronavirus case in the nation's capital. Another person tested positive who attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) conference in suburban Maryland late last month.
But President Trump is remaining upbeat in his coronavirus messaging. Asked if he was concerned about the encroaching virus, Trump said Saturday from Palm Beach, Fla., "No, I'm not concerned at all. No, I'm not. We've done a great job."
As more cases crop up in the U.S. military, the Army is restricting travel for soldiers and their families to and from South Korea, where cases have topped 7,000, the highest number outside of mainland China.
Reuters reports the Army is also restricting movement to Italy.
A U.S. Navy sailor in Italy tested positive on Friday. And a Pentagon spokesman announced Saturday a Marine assigned to Fort Belvoir, Va., tested positive for COVID-19, after returning from overseas.
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Post by Admin on Mar 9, 2020 6:36:40 GMT
New guidance from the CDC urges travelers, especially the elderly and those with compromised health, to avoid long plane trips “and especially” cruises — a stark shift in rhetoric from an administration that had previously appeared reluctant to discourage Americans from moving around the globe. The CDC now recommends that travelers “defer all cruise ship travel worldwide” and notes that “cruise ship passengers are at increased risk of person-to-person spread of infectious diseases, including COVID-19.” The State Department on Sunday also recommended against cruise travel, citing an increased risk of coronavirus infection, and issued a warning that citizens should not rely on repatriation flights "as an option for U.S. citizens under the potential risk of quarantine by local authorities.” The new CDC guidance, coupled with the State Department warning, suggests a seismic shift coming for the cruise industry in particular, which depends heavily on American tourists, and disproportionately older ones. According to the Cruise Lines International Association, the trade group for cruise lines, 1 in 7 cruise passengers is over 70. Mortality rates for the coronavirus are still being determined, but evidence suggests that the elderly, especially those with underlying health conditions, are disproportionately at risk.
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2020 5:09:22 GMT
A fourth Princess Cruises ship is delaying its docking after notifying the U.S. government that two crew members had transferred from another Princess ship in California where a passenger tested positive for coronavirus.
The Caribbean Princess will keep passengers and crew from disembarking after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gave it a “no sail order.” The CDC gave the order because two crew members had transferred from the California Princess ship where a passenger tested positive, the company said.
The crew members are “asymptomatic” and staying alone in their rooms “out of an abundance of caution” as the ship makes its way to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Princess Cruises said in a statement. The ship was originally scheduled to return to Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday.
The Caribbean Princess had been scheduled to dock in Grand Cayman Monday as part of a 10-day trip to the Panama Canal.
Another ship, the Regal Princess docked at Port Everglades, Fla., on Sunday night and passengers were let off the ship after two crew members who transferred from the Grand Princess tested negative for coronavirus. At least 21 people who were aboard the Grand Princess have tested positive for the virus.
It is not clear how many people were on board both ships, but the capacity of the Regal Princess is 3,560 guests and, for the Caribbean Princess, it’s more than 3,600.
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2020 23:58:26 GMT
The cruise ship industry is reeling. The outbreak of the new coronavirus has made the basic fundamentals of the business medically inadvisable to the point that the State Department has issued a warning to U.S. travelers—chief among them the elderly—to stop taking cruise ships until the threat has passed. And yet, even as thousands of people have found themselves stuck on ocean liners, in close confines with others suffering from a deadly virus, not everyone is ready to bag their cruise ship getaway. Indeed, while some shudder at the prospect of enduring severe flu-like symptoms and a 14-day quarantine, others see the vacation deal of a lifetime materializing before their eyes.
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Post by Admin on Mar 14, 2020 22:45:04 GMT
Through genetic analysis of virus samples, infectious disease detectives said Friday that the coronavirus cases that appeared on the Grand Princess cruise ship are very likely traceable back to the original Seattle case that spurred the hot spot to our north — and it's therefore likely that more Bay Area cases can be traced back to the Seattle area as well. ICYMI, genetic sequencing has already occurred on dozens of cases in Seattle that have been traced back to the 35-year-old man being called Patient Zero — though he's surely not the only Patient Zero in the American chapter of this pandemic. As Bloomberg reported, the man arrived back in the U.S. from Wuhan, China on January 15, and he went to an urgent-care facility on January 19 after feeling ill and seeing a CDC alert about the coronavirus. He was fully recovered by January 21, but during the six days in which he was apparently that region's first case of COVID-19, the highly contagious pathogen infected numerous other people, and cascaded into the outbreak they have now — with 37 deaths to date in Washington State and at least 570 cases. The outbreak in California is clearly behind the one in Washington, and as the Mercury News reports, scientists have looked at the small mutations in virus samples from patients that were on the Grand Princess cruise ship and similarly linked them back — in all likelihood — to that first Seattle case. The Placer County man who arrived back in San Francisco on the ship on February 21 and later died first boarded the ship on February 11 — though it can't be proven whether he brought the virus onto the ship or someone else did. Some crew members also became ill on that same leg of the cruise. Some of the Bay Area outbreak, the scientists suggest, could have been fueled by the other Grand Princess passengers who also arrived home on February 21 and unwittingly carried the virus with them. "The simplest explanation is that the cases in the cruise ship were introduced from the cases in Washington state," says Dr. Charles Chiu, a professor of laboratory medicine at UCSF who is leading the genetic sequencing project, speaking to the Mercury News. Chiu explains that the genetic sequences of the virus samples from Seattle and the Bay Area are too closely matched to suggest any other explanation. There were only five cases of the virus in the U.S. as of January 28, and on January 31 we recorded the first Bay Area case, a man in Clara County. It wouldn't be until February 26 that we had the first documented case of community spread of the virus, and it was a woman in Solano County — near where hundred of evacuees had landed in quarantine from a different cruise ship, the Diamond Princess. On March 5, only a week ago, we recorded the first two cases of COVID-19 in San Francisco proper, both the result of community spread. That number now stands at 23, with some cases traced to other known cases. The total number of Bay Area cases now stands at 165.
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