American citizens wave from a bus as they leave the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship at Daikoku Pier to be repatriated to the United States on Feb. 17, 2020 in Yokohama, Japan.
Fourteen Americans infected with coronavirus who flew back to the United States on Monday (Feb. 17) did so against the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), The Washington Post reported .
The Americans were passengers on the cruise ship the Diamond Princess, which became a hotspot for the new coronavirus COVID-19 at the beginning of February. From the first confirmed case on the ship on Feb. 1, the number of infected has risen to over 600.
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None of the infected passengers were showing symptoms of the virus, triggering a debate between the State Department and the CDC. The State Department and a Trump administration health official wanted to send the passengers home on the chartered flight out of Japan anyway, the Post reported. CDC officials, however, warned against evacuating the infected, due to concerns over re-exposing healthy passengers to the virus. When State Department and administration officials decided to go through with the evacuation, the CDC’s principal deputy director, Anne Schuchat, requested not to be included in the news release announcing the decision .
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which is the virus that causes COVID-19, is relatively contagious; it has an R0 (pronounced R-nought) of 2.2, meaning each infected person spreads the virus to an average of 2.2 others , according to a study published Jan. 29 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). For comparison, this R0 value was initially around 3 for SARS, before that number was brought down to less than 1. The flu has an R0 value of about 1.3, according to The New York Times .
“I think those people should not have been allowed on the plane,” Vana Mendizabal, 69, a retired nurse from Florida who was on the flight, told the Post. “They should have been transferred to medical facilities in Japan. We feel we were re-exposed. We were very upset about that.”
Two passengers from the Diamond Princess, both Japanese nationals, have died in hospitals in Japan. With the quarantine period on the ship ending, healthy passengers are now being cleared by Japanese health officials to leave the ship and return home. According to the Princess cruise line , which is owned by Carnival Corp., 600 of the ship’s passengers were cleared on Feb. 20, with several hundred more expected to test negative for the coronavirus in the coming days.