(Newswire.net — March 25, 2020) — When sh*t hits the fan, it’s time to play the blame game. Only this time, it’s not individuals but countries and governments…or their rabid representatives.
Take the case of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. A passenger with a cough joined the cruise when it started on Jan. 20, sailing out of a port in Yokohama, Japan and then disembarking five days later in Hong Kong. Seven days after going ashore, on Feb. 1, he went for a checkup and tested positive for the coronavirus.
The ship cut short its voyage and went back to Yokohama, on Feb. 3, a day earlier than its scheduled Feb. 4. By then, it had been roughly 14 days at sea and calling on ports in Vietnam, Japan, Taipei, and Hong Kong.
It was later learned that an email from Hong Kong health authorities informing the Princess Cruises about the passenger was sent on Feb. 1 and went unnoticed and unread. On Feb. 2, in a followup email, the ship was advised to perform thorough environmental cleansing and disinfection of the ship. Dr. Grant Tarling, the Princess’ chief medical doctor, admitted that it wasn’t followed and only the lowest-level protocols were done.
Both ship and company officials had the mistaken belief that since the infected passenger and his companions were already gone from the ship, the risk of transmission and infection was low.
According to company officials, the doctor only learned of the case on the night of Feb. 2 but a company email from him with the subject Confirmed Coronavirus Case sent to Hong Kong authorities showed that he already knew about it in the morning. The ship arrived in Yokohama in the evening of Feb. 3. The delayed and inadequate response from the Princess Cruises, owner of the Diamond Princess, was a huge factor in the rapid spread of the disease on board.
Another omission by the company was not undertaking contact tracing immediately. Contact tracing is the questioning of each passenger and crew if they had been in close contact (within two meters) with any of the group who disembarked in Hong Kong. Before the Japanese officials arrived, regular ship activities went on. Large buffets were open to everyone, parlor games and dancing went on, without regard for the transmission of the virus.
In fairness, the coronavirus is a new disease, the first case being in December 2019, and not much was known about it. As it turns out, it has an incubation period that could last for 14 days.
It was only around 11pm of Feb. 3 when Japanese medical teams boarded the ship that all passengers were ordered to stay in their cabins. The first tests were carried out on 273 people. Throughout the whole period, Japanese doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other workers who were members of the Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT), Self-Defense Forces (SDF) and Ministry of Health worked round the clock to attend to the crew and passengers and ensure the safety of the people on board.
But in exchange for Japan’s goodwill and humanitarian consideration, it was widely criticized by foreign media. Japan’s political opposition also seized on the opportunity to discredit the ruling party. Several medical experts have said the quarantine should have been done in facilities on land, not on the cruise ship. They claimed that the ship was an “incubator for infection,” and the quarantine“…violated the individual human rights,” and was “not sufficient to prevent transmission,” among others.
But Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases, who was one of its harshest critics and had called the quarantine a failure, admitted saying that “The original statement, which is not unreasonable, was that the best thing to do with these people was to keep them safely quarantined in an infection-control manner on the ship.”
Another specialist, Dr. Isaac Bogoch of Toronto’s University Health Network, recognized the difficulty Japan faced in managing the outbreak of Covid-19. Finding and designating suitable facilities for 3,711 passengers and crew on such short notice is a challenge that even Abe’s harshest critics cannot hope to solve.
On the criticism of shortage of testing kits, Health Minister Katsunobu Kato said as much, and explained that testing was prioritized for the elderly and the symptomatic. Aside from the lack of testing equipment, there was the logistical challenge of transporting the samples via accredited couriers to accredited testing centers.
A Japanese professor from Kobe University who went onboard for less than two hours posted a video online denouncing the chaotic conditions on the Diamond Princess. As it turned out, he wasn’t part of any group and was interfering with the works of the various teams on the ship. For being a nuisance, he was ordered to leave.
But the bigger question of responsibility remains. Who should have been in charge of the ship and become the lead in establishing quarantine measures and protocol? Is it the Japanese authorities? Or the American-owned Princess Cruises? Or the British government, where the boat is registered?
International laws are murky on these matters. The duty of handling the testing of people on the Diamond Princess, providing them with ample supply of masks and protective gear, and procuring medications for existing medical conditions and observing quarantine protocols are not clearly established.
American experts are quick to point out the flaws of others. But they bungled the repatriation flights of their own countrymen when the quarantine period ended by mixing 14 infected passengers with the healthy ones.
Some American passengers who were interviewed were disappointed by the treatment they got from the government. Mr. Haering, left behind in a Tokyo hospital after testing positive for the virus, said he didn’t hear from the company or from the US Embassy in Tokyo at all and he felt a sense of abandonment.
Another example of American absurdity is the ban of certain European countries from entering the US, including Finland, Iceland, Slovenia, and Poland, who have 47 to 109 cases of the coronavirus. The current case count in the US is almost 1,400 and rising. Shouldn’t these countries be banning incoming US flights instead? And what’s to prevent people from these countries from flying to the UK, which isn’t covered by the ban, to enter the US?
The UK government has been silent, literally. The son of a British couple, following up on his parents’ plight, told BBC that he’s not hearing anything from the government, in spite of repeated calls. Other passengers say they were very disappointed with the slow response of their officials, including the flights to take them back to their country. The repatriation was delayed, and the plane flew out of Tokyo on Feb. 22, days after the quarantine had ended.
Shigeru Omi, a former regional director for the World Health Organization, has said the isolation “was not ideal as would be expected from a hospital.” Dealing with thousands of people quarantined on the Diamond Princess, and providing for their foods, medicines, and supplies while protecting their medical workers and the public on land is a herculean task. Making it worse was, it wasn’t an expected occurrence.