Gay Courter - Quarantine!

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

ISBN: 978-1-64293-683-4

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-684-1

Quarantine!:

How I Survived the Diamond Princess Coronavirus Crisis

2020 by Gay Courter

All Rights Reserved

Back cover photo by Jerome Giambalvo

This is a work of nonfiction. All people, locations, events, and situations are portrayed to the best of the authors memory. Names and details about some of the people, relationships, job descriptions, and companies in the book have been altered for reasons of privacy and security.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

Also by Gay Courter

Fiction

The Midwife

River of Dreams

Code Ezra

Flowers in the Blood

The Midwifes Advice

Healing Paradise

The Girl in the Box

Nonfiction

The Beansprout Book

I Speak for This Child: True Stories of a Child Advocate

How to Survive Your Husbands Midlife Crisis (co-author with Pat Gaudette)

Dedicated to

the fourteen souls who lost their lives,

the 712 men and women who suffered with COVID-19,

the 1045 officers and crew led by Captain Arma, gladiators all,

and with love and gratitude to

our childrenBlake, Joshua, and Ashleywho helped bring us home,

and Philip, without whom survival is meaningless

Contents

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

Tom Stoppard

I heard a loud double knock at the door of our mini-suite on the Diamond Princess cruise ship.

Can you get that? I shouted to my husband as I stepped out of the shower.

Phil didnt respond. I put on my robe and peered out but didnt see him. Its hard to lose someone in 354 square feet. I felt a breeze and realized he was on the balcony filming the chaos on the pier below. We were docked in Yokohama, the port for Tokyo. It was the evening of February 9, 2020. Four days earlier, the Japanese Ministry of Health had ordered us to quarantine in our cabins. The ship had been exposed to a virulent new pathogen, the same one that in just a few weeks had caused cases of a respiratory illness in China to balloon to forty thousand, with more than eight hundred deaths, well surpassing their 20022003 SARS epidemic statistics. In a bizarre coincidence, a man from Hong Kong, who had joined the cruise with us on January 20 and left on the 25th, had tested positive for the coronavirus after leaving the ship. Now, instead of enjoying the rest of our Asian vacation, we were among more than thirty-seven hundred passengers and crew who had just completed a dazzling cruise celebrating the Lunar New Year and awakened one morning to learn that we were marooned on a modern-day plague ship.

As soon as we heard about the man from Hong Kong and realized we were at the mercy of the Japanese health authorities, I emailed a friend who had been an ABC news producer. Guess where we are? I wrote. By the next day, we were blindsided by a barrage of interview requests. Texts and emails were coming in so fast we barely had time to reply, let alone schedule appointments for audio, print, and television in time zones that circled the globe.

This whole experiencewhich began with the announcement about the disembarked passenger on February 3, the evening before our scheduled departurewas our first taste of a media frenzy. Helicopters whirred around the ship. A red-carpets throng of reporters was kept at bay by a police cordon. Behind them was a phalanx of satellite vans. But who was giving them information about what was happening on the ship? The captain? The Japanese authorities? Princess PR? We just knew that every day, more and more of our fellow passengers were contracting this terrifying, yet-unnamed coronavirus that wasnt a cold or the flu. Ten cases among the passengers were announced the morning of February 5, at the same time the quarantine was imposed. When our daughter, Ashley, heard this news, she jumped into the Twitterverse to gather more information. The next day another ten people were sent to local hospitals. She called her brothers: Josh in Oregon and Blake in Massachusetts. Theyre so vulnerable, she sobbed. Thats twenty-one total. We have to get them off that ship!

Chill, Ash, Blake told her. Youd expect one infected person to have that many contacts.

Its flu season, Josh said, and you know Mom is a maniac about all of us getting flu shots.

When there were no new cases announced on February 7, Blake wrote a group email telling everyone to relax and that Mom is probably using the time to plan her next cruise. Of course, he didnt know that we were sublimating our panic by telling our story to whoever would listen while simultaneously sending the kids upbeat emails and asking for pictures of our seven grandchildren to cheer us up.

We were not strangers to the media. Im a bestselling writer whos been on many book tours. Ive appeared on all the morning shows and done other national television for both novels and nonfiction. Phil is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who is far more comfortable on the other side of a camera, but he knows what producers want in terms of sound bites and succinct messaging. As boomers in our seventies, we fit into the grandparents-on-holiday niche; and while hardly influential enough to attract a wide social media following, we wereas they sayrelatable, and at that point, the journalists wanted to know how it felt having our dream trip interrupted and how we were handling being cooped up involuntarily. They were especially interested in what the ships kitchen was giving us to eat.

Ashleys Twitter and Instagram friends thought we were lucky to be getting a free cruise out of Princess, which infuriated her because she felt we were in danger. We understood why she was so fearful. She had spent ten years in foster care before we adopted her at age twelve, and her emotional dependence on us was far more intense than that of the older boys.

Everything changed on February 8 with the announcement of forty-one new passenger cases, a total of more than sixty in less than a week. Any vestige of denial on our part dissolved. Our health was at riskand possibly our lives.

When I phoned Blake, he immediately asked, How many new victims? and when he heard the answer, his tone turned from light-hearted to serious. Blake has the classic engineer personality and a reputation for solving complex problems. Hes thoughtful, precise, executes plans flawlessly with as little emotion as possibleand always meets his objectives.

What can I do to help get you out of there?

I told him how the media was descending fast and furious and we couldnt do both the organizing and the interviews. And frankly Im creeped out. How are more and more passengers getting sick when nobody has been out of their cabins? They arent telling us whats really going on. We arent safe here. We have to find a way to get the hell out of thisthis posh penitentiary.