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Offloading passengers from the coronavirus-stricken cruise ship Grand Princess at the Port of Oakland is expected to begin Monday and could take two to three days, Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a news conference Sunday.
Officials were anticipating the ship would cross the Golden Gate on Monday but bar pilots must first determine the best cross-current and tidal conditions window — which could be just a few hours long — in order to dock the massive ship at an unused berth in the port.
Federal law enforcement officers were in the process Sunday of securing and fencing in an 11-acre site in the Port of Oakland where all of the operations would take place. No port workers were involved, Newsom said, and the site will be completely scrubbed after the operation is over.
Health officials were expected to be working on evaluating patients for offloading on Sunday afternoon. Those who are symptomatic will be the first to leave the ship and receive medical support or hospitalization Monday.
The next group of people to disembark will be the almost 1,000 Californians who are on the ship, followed by others from all over the country and the world.
“For passengers, we’re not able to tell you exactly when (they’ll disembark),” Newsom said. “The cruise ship will come into the port as we work out the enormity of preparing the site and prepare for a quick turnaround and quick boarding of hasty teams that are going to be making their way onto the ship.”
Of the 3,535 people aboard the Grand Princess, 21 have tested positive for the coronavirus. As soon as the ship is debarked, it will leave the Oakland port, Newsom said. But with only 45 people on board tested so far, the 3,490 other people aboard the ship still need testing — a daunting task.
As of Sunday, the number of confirmed cases in California had reached 114. About 788 people have been tested in the state, the governor said, and labs here now have the capacity to test just under 8,000 more people. The federal Centers for Disease Control is expected to raise testing by about 12,000 in the coming days.
California Health and Human Services Agency Secretary Mark Ghaly said withholding the testing until the passengers make it to the various military bases was important “both from a supply issue but also for a timing issue.”
“We are not holding people at the Port of Oakland to wait for positive tests. They will find those results at a different location,” Ghaly said during the news conference.
The passengers who have tested positive for coronavirus or have been exposed to the virus on the ship won’t be quarantined in Oakland, Mayor Libby Schaaf said Sunday.
“Oakland’s role in this operation is to support our state and federal authorities as they conduct a critical public health mission to help those impacted by the COVID-19 virus,” Schaaf said in the statement. “I appreciate Governor Newsom’s leadership and have been assured no one will be quarantined in Oakland, nor will any passengers be released into the general public. True to our community values, Oakland is a safe harbor for all.”
The ship received permission from Newsom Saturday to dock in the port and for its thousands of passengers and crew to disembark; the port was said to offer a large, secure space, removed from population centers, unlike cruise-ship terminals in San Francisco.
From the port, the nearly 1,000 California passengers onboard the cruise ship will be transported on secured chartered buses to Travis Air Force in Fairfield or Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego for a mandatory 14-day quarantine and medical monitoring period.
Passengers from other states will be taken to a non-public area of Oakland International Airport to board private chartered planes, and will mostly be sent to Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas or Dobbins Air Force Base in Georgia for their quarantines. It is not clear where passengers from other countries will be taken.
Both Newsom and Schaaf reiterated Sunday that these passengers will not be allowed in contact with the general public.
“The City of Oakland, Alameda County and the Port of Oakland are stepping up in a major way, and their residents deserve universal praise,” Newsom said. “They are showing the world what makes our state great – coming to the rescue of thousands of people trapped aboard this ship and helping tackle a national emergency.”
Newsom added that state and federal officials also considered ports in Alameda, San Francisco — where the cruise departed from — and other parts of the state, but determined that the site in Oakland site was the most suitable location to offload the ship’s passengers.
“The logistics at the site along the Embarcadero, the proximity to residences and disruption that would’ve ensued was such that we determined that was not the appropriate site,” Newsom said of the San Francisco option.
Newsom said Sunday he does not foresee using the Port of Oakland for similar scenarios in the future, but noted he was “not naive” and said the situation regarding the coronavirus remained dynamic. The governor also pointedly took exception to a question about the Trump administration’s response to the virus, saying federal officials had so far given California the required support.
Federal officials did not answer questions Sunday about how they would handle the disembarkation and care for passengers and crew who were sick or had been exposed.
In an interview with ABC News’s “This Week,” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson refused to talk about the federal plan for handling potential exposure to coronavirus on cruise ships like the Grand Princess, saying only that Vice President Mike Pence and CEOs of major cruise lines met Saturday and would come up with a plan “within 72 hours of that meeting.”
Newsom said he would “highly recommend and almost demand” that California residents, especially those over the age of 50 or with compromised health conditions, not travel on a cruise.
“It is beyond me that you would for any other reason than for expectations, perhaps financial, that you would do so,” Newsom said. “It is in the interest of the cruise ship industry to own this moment, not consider short-termism and situational bottom lines but to look at the sustainability of their industry. I assure you you will hear a lot more from me in the days and weeks because we simply, as a state, cannot experience this kind of operation at the scale that is likely if people continue to participate with those conditions on these large cruise ships that come in and out of our ports.”
At the press conference Sunday, Schaaf also said she has impressed upon state and federal officials that Oakland, and portside neighborhoods in particular, “have been the victims of environmental racism and injustice” in the past.
“I continue to receive detailed information about every step being taken to isolate the threat and that we can give our residents every assurance of their safety,” Schaaf said. “We asked a lot of question about ‘why Oakland?’ My questions are not over, I’m continuing to ask them and expect answers and I will continue to share those with people.”
Relatives of guests on the Grand Princess Cruise can call 888-358-8055 for family assistance.
