After being confined to her room aboard the coronavirus-stricken Grand Princess cruise ship, held in federal quarantine for 14 days at Travis Air Force Base, and struggling through weeks of uncertainty, Jacqueline Baker has finally come home to the Bay Area.

But the place she left more than a month ago has been dramatically transformed, into a dark new world with eerie echoes of the experience the 56-year-old from Los Gatos just left. And she sees trouble ahead. For now, though, her first order of business is sheltering in place with her new boyfriend.

“I think he was kind of a saint for coming to get me,” Baker said Tuesday.

As happy as she is to be out of quarantine, to be done switching between the only two outfits she had at Travis, and to eat home-cooked food, Baker is worried people aren’t taking the virus that upended her world seriously enough.

“I don’t think it’s ever going to be behind me and I think it’s going to change the face of the world,” said Baker, who boarded the Grand Princess in San Francisco on Feb. 21 for what was supposed to be a relaxing 15-day cruise to Hawaii and back.

The trip was cut short, ending in Oakland after a dramatic, nearly week-long mission to offload more than 2,500 passengers after 21 passengers and crew tested positive for COVID-19 illness. Many of those passengers are finally emerging from quarantine this week, to a radically changed world.

“Americans should be more scared than they are,” said Baker, living at her boyfriend’s home in the Saratoga hills.

From inside her two-week quarantine at Travis, Baker monitored the pandemic through her phone, reading about how aggressive testing for the virus in Singapore and South Korea was credited with limiting the damage from the outbreak.

“Other countries have tracked it, and not only tracked it but when they’re finding positives, isolating people and the people those people have contacted,” said Baker, who works as assistant to the owner of a Los Gatos travel agency.

At Travis, she said, cruise ship passengers were allowed for the first three days to line up for meals and eat together at small tables. She took one look and retreated to her room. Subsequently, everyone was told to eat in their rooms, she said.

Passengers were ordered to maintain social distancing outside their rooms, she said. But no one prevented people from engaging in dangerous practices, she said, even after two people in quarantine tested positive. On her final day of quarantine, she said, she saw people outside playing an improvised game of bocce with fruit.

“There’s an egg in the middle and they’re throwing apples and oranges at it, which I guess was quarantine fun, but also not too smart because they were all touching the fruit,” she said.

Baker’s recounting of her experience in quarantine raises questions about efforts to control the infection among passengers sent to Travis. Though she said she and others with no symptoms were told that getting tested for COVID-19 could lead to a longer quarantine, Baker asked for a test. On Monday, when she learned she was to be released, she said she called a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services case worker to say she wanted to stay at Travis until her results came back, telling them,”I don’t want to be carrying (the virus) back out.” She said she was told her concerns would be passed to a higher up, but she did not hear back before her release.

Seven of 115 people at Travis who were tested for the COVID-19 virus were confirmed positive, moved off the base to special facilities and were not due to be released, an official with the U.S. Centers For Disease Control said last weekend. Another 191 were still awaiting test results but were to be released because they had completed their quarantine and are no longer considered a risk. A Health and Human Services spokesperson said Tuesday passengers who have left will be notified as soon as their results are available.

As worried as Baker remains for the future of her country, and the health of her friends and family, she’s reveling in her relative freedom. She was delighted to see her boyfriend, Bill. She was looking forward to eating something — anything — that wasn’t processed turkey, a staple of her Travis diet.

To welcome her home, Bill had cooked soup from scratch — turkey soup. “I didn’t complain,” she said. “I had a nice petite sirah to go with the turkey soup. It was a nice soup, it was a nice gesture, and it was nice to eat something that was real food.”

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NIH official to ‘retire’ after being ID’d as anti-Fauci author Baker was just as overjoyed to pick up fresh clothes at her Los Gatos apartment, after living in just two outfits at the air base. She’s going to have to go into Los Gatos and her office soon to do the payroll, but she plans to go at night, to avoid people. Bill has stocked up on food, and friends had bought groceries for her return from quarantine.

“I’m happy I’m here with my fairly new boyfriend,” she said. “We figured it would be a lot more friendly and fun to isolate together. I think we’re going to get to know each other a whole lot better.”

She already has a vacation booked for December. Pandemic permitting, she’ll be heading to Mexico — on a five-day cruise.