A fun Grand Princess cruise, turns into painful nightmare for Sonoma County passengers

They returned to Sonoma County in late February from a cruise aboard the Grand Princess to Mexico’s white sand beaches, a seafaring journey with pageantry, white tablecloth dinners, Las Vegas-style shows and casino gambling.

Once home, the fun turned to sickness and ongoing worries they either had or still are contagious with coronavirus. They had coughs and colds. They had digestive problems. They had fevers. One woman said her lungs hurt terribly. Others returned healthy.

Suzi Schultz of Santa Rosa assumed the body aches and fever were a case of strep throat.

Even though she has fully recovered, Schultz, like a group of local residents who took that leisurely voyage Feb. 11 to Feb. 21 from San Francisco to Mexico, now view what they thought were common illnesses from a new, scarier perspective.

At least two hospitalized county residents and five people from Placer County who took this February Mexican cruise have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus.

When they disembarked the Grand Princess ship, it sailed on to Hawaii and has since become the site of a Northern California floating outbreak of the infectious disease that originated in China in January, and since has afflicted more than 101,000 people in at least 83 countries.

“By this time, you’d think they’d just test people,” Schultz said of the cruise passengers already home. “Clearly, if I had the same symptoms now that I had when I left the ship they would have tested right away.”

In the United States, 17 people have died from the virus, including a Placer County man - also a passenger on the Grand Princess February cruise - who this week became the first person in California to die from the infection.

Dr. Sundari Mase, Sonoma County’s interim health officer, said as of Friday passengers from the February Grand Princess cruise have been off the ship for 14 days, a crucial threshold meaning they are unlikely to be infectious even if they were carriers of coronavirus. And passengers who were ill and recovered are unlikely to test positive for the virus, she said.

“At this time we do not have any evidence of community spread,” Mase said, trying to reassure an uneasy public the disease is not being transmitted throughout the county.

Mase said a county public health nurse has tried to contact each of the 78 local passengers who were on the recent Grand Princess voyage to Mexico and has either spoken with each by phone or left messages.

But some passengers said their calls to the public health department are going unanswered. Those who have spoken with public health representatives said it only raised more concerns about the local government’s ability to handle a growing outbreak.

“The first time that I called, somebody answered and said I was on the wrong cruise line and they gave me a second number to call,” Santa Rosa resident Jerry Anderson said. “That number had been disconnected.”

But Anderson, 78, was in fact on the Grand Princess the same time as the two Sonoma County residents with confirmed cases of coronavirus, and still hospitalized and seriously ill.

After that first call, Anderson said he’s made countless more to a variety of health department phone numbers, only to be redirected through automated phone systems and leaving messages to no avail. He and his wife have no COVID-19 symptoms and they didn’t take a Sonoma County Airport Express shuttle bus from the port home that public officials said 25 ship passengers, including the two who have fallen ill, had taken.

The unanswered messages and the lack of response from county health officials all have contributed to a growing sense that local officials are not prepared to handle coronavirus.

“I thought their response to this whole thing has been just terrible,” Anderson said. “It isn’t what I expect from my paid officials.”

Dr. Celeste Philip, the county’s outgoing health officer, said Thursday the local disease control investigation is focused on tracking down the cruise passengers who took the shuttle bus with the two local residents hospitalized.

Schultz, Anderson, and other county passengers interviewed for this story say they have done their best to take responsibility for the potential, however remote it may be, they are carriers of the virus. They called their doctors and the local health department. They avoided contact with friends. They stayed home.

They worry about the people they met on the Grand Princess cruise. They fret about all those they’ve encountered since coming home, wondering if they might have passed the virus to them. They are dental hygienists, flight attendants, they run small businesses. Many are retired.

Some were too concerned about the stigma surrounding the virus to speak on the record for this story.

Santa Rosa resident Vicki Eschelbach, 64, took the Mexican cruise with her husband, 73. A fellow county resident they met on the Grand Princess later tracked her down to make sure neither one of them was one of the two unidentified county residents in the hospital being treated for coronavirus.

After the Mexican cruise passengers disembarked Feb. 21 in San Francisco, the ship sailed on to Hawaii and on its return this week has become the site of a widely publicized coronavirus outbreak still not fully known.

Vice President Mike Pence announced Friday that 21 of the ?45 people on the ship tested positive, including 19 crew members, raising fears the infectious disease is spreading among the more than 3,500 passengers still aboard. Over the weekend, all passengers and crew will be tested. The Grand Princess was ordered to remain off the coast of California, while federal officials redirect it from the Port of San Francisco to an unidentified more secure “noncommercial” port.

That new worrisome news has convinced many of the local cruise passengers home from the Mexican leg of the voyage that their concerns about the possibility that more cases of the virus could turn up here are warranted.

Eschelbach, who remains in good health yet concerned she may be carrying the virus, called the driver who brought her and her husband from the shuttle bus stop near the Santa Rosa Veterans Hall to their home and alerted him passengers on the Grand Princess cruise ship had fallen ill. The man was battling an illness and they don’t know what to think, she said.

“I’ve been around probably 150 people since I’ve been home,” Eschellbach said. “I’m a flight attendant for a living.”

Gay Dering of Santa Rosa returned home from an earlier January cruise on the Grand Princess with a terrible flu-like ailment. She suffered a fever, cough and painful lungs that kept her in bed for four or five days.

Her trip was in late January, about the same time a passenger on a Princess Cruises sister ship, the Diamond Princess, disembarked in Hong Kong with an illness eventually confirmed to be coronavirus. Since then, seven passengers on that ship have died - and one infected passenger transferred to a Santa Rosa hospital in late February remains in isolation there.

Dering, 64, said she has to assume that’s what she had, too, given the worldwide spread of the disease and how little is known about its prevalence in the United States.

When she was ill, Dering stayed home, avoided her family members and ensured no one else had to deal with her sickness. That was weeks before anyone in Sonoma County would be tested for coronavirus and found to have contracted it.

But at that time, news was emerging about the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent quarantine of the Diamond Princess ship in Japan. Her husband, Tom Dering, became worried she might have the infectious disease. He said he left several messages with the county health department.

“I’ve fully recovered, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have it,” Dering said of the coronavirus. “I think the virus has been among us for longer than we realized.”

You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 707-521-5220 or julie.johnson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jjpressdem.