Cruise ship passengers quarantined at California military bases with no plans for coronavirus testing

Nearly 1,000 Californians will wait out a 14-day quarantine at two state military bases, a mandatory detention that has turned a relaxing social cruise to Hawaii into a month-long travail.

There are yet no plans to test the former guests of the Grand Princess cruise ship to detect the presence of the COVID-19 virus, which spread to 21 passengers.

The ship docked at the Port of Oakland on Monday and was met by buses, ambulances and workers in protective gear. Of the 173 Americans who were allowed to leave the ship on Monday night, 149 were given masks and loaded onto buses for the trip to Travis Air Force Base and 24 were transported via ambulance to Bay Area hospitals. Of 234 Canadians who disembarked, 232 were transported for repatriation to Canada and two went to Bay Area hospitals.

Only 45 of the 3,535 people on board have been tested so far. They were selected because they were considered at high risk of infection or already showed symptoms of the illness, such as fever, congestion and shortness of breath.

“I think it would be much better to test everyone aboard,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University.

Gene Qin of San Francisco, who was still aboard the Grand Princess Tuesday morning, said his 73-year-old wife Dianne has run a fever and been coughing since last Thursday. She has not been tested for coronavirus, much less given priority to leave the ship, he said.

“She needs testing and that's why it's urgent she gets off the ship,” said Qin, 73, a retired lab supervisor from UC San Francisco. “Nobody can give us information.”

Passengers who arrived at Travis Air Force Base on late Monday were told they will receive daily temperature checks and medical screening for symptoms. Passengers may also be sent to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, according to the California Office of Emergency Services.

“At this time, we expect your quarantine will last 14 days,” until March 23, according to a check-in letter given at Travis to all incoming passengers.

There is no word about the prospect of a test, which could tell them whether they are sick or healthy, perhaps shortening the length of their ordeal. Earlier, the Department of Health and Human Services said that testing of all passengers would be conducted.

Tests are now abundant and widely available, Vice President Mike Pence said at a Monday news briefing at the White House. More than a million coronavirus tests have been distributed so far, and that another four million tests would be distributed by the end of the week, he said.

“We were told that they would continue to evaluate us and there was no schedule for testing,” said passenger Suzanne Suwanda of Los Gatos, who arrived at her Travis Air Force Base hotel on Monday evening.

A new study released Monday by scientists at Johns Hopkins University found that most people who catch COVID-19-the disease caused by the novel coronavirus-start to show symptoms about five days, on average, after infection.

The vast majority of those infected so far have only mild symptoms that are virtually indistinguishable from symptoms of the common cold or seasonal flu, according to a study of over 44,000 patients by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scientists caution that prompt testing may not pick up early infections, because there isn't enough genetic material to be seen.

“It can detect infectious RNA - but not early in the infection. Early on, it's not making that much RNA, so it's not detected,” said Dr. John Swartzberg of the UC Berkeley – UCSF Joint Medical Program and the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.

“We know by the time symptoms appear, we will find it,” he said. “And we also know in a small number we can find it before symptoms. But we don't know how long before.”

“We are asking more of the test than it can give us,” he said.

Only some of the passengers on Grand Princess, stranded for days off the coast of California, were released on Monday. More than half still remain on board.

Last month, 156 passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise – also exposed to the virus – were offered tests. After completion of their quarantine and a negative test result, they were released.

The cruise company says that the virus was brought aboard the ship by a passenger on a previous leg of the voyage. Grant Tarling, the chief medical officer of the company, said at a weekend press briefing that the passenger, a Placer County man who has since died, infected two crew members who served him meals. The virus then spread more widely on the ship.

“We believe his illness was community acquired in California before he joined the ship” on Feb. 11, said Tarling. This is disputed by health authorities in Placer County, who say the man “likely contracted the disease during international travel to Mexico.”

Now illnesses in a dozen people - four in Placer County, two in Contra Costa County, two in Sonoma County and one each in Santa Cruz, Ventura, Madera and Alameda counties – are linked to that previous leg of the cruise.

On the troubled evacuation of the previous ship, the Diamond Princess, some infections were apparently acquired during the emptying of the ship, the boarding of buses or the flight back to California.

On Monday, Sacramento County announced Monday that its public health department will no longer recommend isolation or quarantine for people exposed to someone with COVID-19, making a pivot from a strategy of containment to one of mitigation, according to the Sacramento Bee.

In an interview, Dr. Peter Beilenson, head of the county's Department of Health Services, told the Bee that the county is instead “trying to mitigate the risk to those who are most at risk: the elderly and those with chronic underlying conditions.”

In the new Johns Hopkins study, about 97.5% of infected people develop symptoms within 11.5 days of exposure. The median incubation period of the virus is 5.1 days, the scientists reported in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. The study - the largest and most definitive yet - is based on 181 case studies of Chinese people who had traveled to the Hubei Province or its capital Wuhan, where the disease first appeared.

As of Tuesday, the disease has spread to more than 110 countries and territories, with more than 113,000 confirmed cases and millions of people under quarantine.