More than 300 US cruise ship passengers, including 14 who tested positive for COVID-19, were on Monday being quarantined at military bases in California and Texas after arriving from Japan on charter flights overnight.
One plane carrying cruise passengers touched down at Travis Air Force Base in northern California just before midnight on Sunday, while another arrived at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas early on Monday.
The passengers are to remain at the bases for two weeks.
Japanese Minister of Defense Taro Kono tweeted earlier that Japanese troops helped transport 340 US passengers on 14 buses from Yokohama Port to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.
About 380 Americans were on the cruise ship.
The US said that it arranged for the evacuation because people on the Diamond Princess were at a high risk of exposure to the virus.
For the departing Americans, the evacuation cuts short a 14-day quarantine that began aboard the cruise ship on Feb. 5.
The US Department of State later announced that 14 of the evacuees received confirmation that they had the virus, but were allowed to board the flight because they had no symptoms. They were being kept isolated from other passengers on the flight, the US departments of state and health and human services said in a joint statement.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the US National Institutes of Health, on Sunday said that an infected person who shows minimal symptoms could still pass the virus to someone else.
It is unclear which base the 14 who tested positive for the virus went to.
The evacuees who arrived at Travis Air Force Base would be housed at a different location from the more than 200 other Americans who were already being quarantined on the base, US officials said.
Those people have been at the base since earlier this month, when they arrived from China.
No Travis personnel would have contact with the passengers, officials said.
Now that they are in the US, the cruise ship passengers must go through another 14 days of quarantine at the military facilities — meaning they would have been under quarantine for nearly four weeks in total.
Americans Cheryl and Paul Molesky, a couple from Syracuse, New York, opted to trade one coronavirus quarantine for another, leaving the cruise ship to fly back to the US.
Cheryl Molesky said the rising number of patients on the ship factored into the decision.
“We are glad to be going home,” Cheryl Molesky earlier told NHK TV in Japan.
“It’s just a little bit disappointing that we’ll have to go through quarantine again, and we will probably not be as comfortable as the Diamond Princess, possibly,” she said.
Some US passengers said that they would pass up the opportunity to fly home because of the additional quarantine.
There also was worry about being on a long flight with other passengers who might be infected or in an incubation period.
One of the Americans, Matthew Smith, said in a tweet on Sunday that he saw a passenger with no mask talking at close quarters with another passenger.
He said he and his wife scurried away.
“If there are secondary infections on board, this is why, and you wanted me to get on a bus with her,” he said.
He said the US health officials who visited their room were surprised that the couple had decided to stay, and wished them luck.
“Thanks, but we’re fine,” Smith said he told them.
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