No Taiwanese are among the 10 people on board a cruise ship quarantined in Japan’s Port of Yokohama who have so far tested positive for the 2019 novel coronavirus, the cruise line operator said yesterday.
Nine passengers — three Japanese, three Hong Kongers, two Australians and one American — and one Philippine crew member have tested positive, following an initial health screening conducted by Japanese health authorities of all 3,700 passengers and crew on the Diamond Princess, Princess Cruises said in a statement.
“These 10 persons, who have been notified, will be taken ashore by Japan Coast Guard watercraft and transported to local hospitals for care by shoreside Japanese medical professionals,” the company said, adding that the ship would remain under quarantine in Yokohama for at least 14 days, as required by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.
The ship has 2,666 guests, about half of whom are Japanese, and 1,045 crew members of various nationalities, it said.
The company did not say how many Taiwanese were on board, but Chinese-language media reported that there were about 20.
The ship’s eight-day cruise, scheduled to begin yesterday, has been canceled, the company said.
The Diamond Princess on Friday last week docked in the Port of Keelung, Princess Cruises representative Peter Chen (陳欣德) told reporters in Taipei, adding that the company is checking if any passengers confirmed to have the virus disembarked during the port call.
A total of 2,694 people disembarked on Friday and entered the nation through Keelung, Taiwan International Ports Corp said in a statement, citing National Immigration Agency statistics.
The cruise line operator has not made public the identities of the 10 passengers confirmed to have the virus, so it has not been able to confirm whether they entered Taiwan, the Port of Keelung said, adding that the ship arrived in Keelung at about 7am and left at 5pm.
Princess Cruises released its statement after Japanese Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Katsunobu Kato yesterday confirmed the 10 cases and Japanese authorities continued to screen the thousands on board the ship.
The health screenings identified 273 people needing further testing, with the 10 confirmed cases showing up in 31 sets of results received up to that point, Kato said.
The health checks began on Monday evening, when the ship returned to Yokohama, after an 80-year-old Hong Kong man who had traveled on the vessel late last month later tested positive for the coronavirus upon his return to Hong Kong.
The man took a five-day cruise on the Diamond Princess, setting sail on Jan. 20 from Yokohama and disembarking on Jan. 25 in Hong Kong, where he tested positive for the coronavirus on Saturday last week, six days after leaving the ship, local media reported.
Taiwan on Tuesday announced that cruise ships that have visited China, Hong Kong or Macau in the past 14 days would be prohibited from entering the nation’s ports, effective immediately.
Meanwhile, cruise ships that have carried passengers confirmed or suspected of becoming infected with the coronavirus within the previous 28 days would also be refused entry.
Due to the ban, the Diamond Princess has canceled a port call for Keelung scheduled for Feb. 25, while the World Dream cruise ship has postponed a port call to Keelung from Tuesday next week to Feb. 22, a tourism agency representative said yesterday.
The Port of Kaohsiung on Tuesday evening prohibited a port call by the World Dream after it was reported that three passengers who traveled on the ship last month later developed coronavirus symptoms.
The ship returned to Hong Kong late on Tuesday.
The ban is expected to affect 16 port calls scheduled for this month and next to Kaohsiung, Taiwan International Ports Corp said yesterday, adding that five port calls scheduled for this month to Keelung have been canceled and one postponed.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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