Detroit woman recounts coronavirus ordeal on Diamond Princess, double quarantines

She left her northwest Detroit home Jan. 17, excited for a two-week cruise with her family to Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and Hong Kong.

But Rosalind McDavid had no idea she was stepping into a nightmare she still hasn't escaped.

The 72-year-old Ford retiree was among the more than 3,700 passengers and crew quarantined aboard the 18-deck luxury Diamond Princess cruise ship amid a worldwide novel coronavirus outbreak.

As of Saturday, at least 705 people from the ship have had confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, according to the World Health Organization, and six have died.

New cases among passengers of the Diamond Princess continue to be added to the global coronavirus tally, which on Saturday afternoon reached more than 85,000 cases in 60 countries around the world. About 3,000 people have died, including a man in Washington state, who became the first American fatality in the outbreak, health officials announced Saturday.

In the United States, as of Saturday afternoon, there were 65 cases of COVID-19 in seven states. And reports of new cases in California, Oregon and Washington state without any recent travel abroad or close contact with others who were known to have the virus suggest it is now spreading through West Coast communities.

So far, McDavid has managed to stay healthy and upbeat.

"I'm feeling great," she told the Free Press on Friday from her room at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California, where she's finishing up her second quarantine.

"I hate to worry. So I just pray ... and I just kept taking my temperature. ... I taught myself, don't worry. I just live life."

It's clear, McDavid said, that she and her siblings were exposed to the pneumonia-like virus that causes fever, coughing and shortness of breath.

If the exposure wasn't aboard the Diamond Princess, then it could have been on Feb. 16 on the the buses that took them to Haneda Airport. Or they could have been exposed on the 10-hour flight back to the United States aboard a State Department-chartered plane where only a plastic sheet separated the sick travelers from the healthy ones.

In a telephone interview earlier this week with the Free Press, McDavid recounted her ordeal, still hopeful that she and her siblings won't end up the latest COVID-19 cases in a grim running total that just keeps climbing.

A family trip of a lifetime

It was supposed to be a return to Japan with her siblings — Wanda Davis of Orlando, and Ercell Grimes Jr. and his wife, Ernestine Grimes, of Birmingham, Alabama — to remember their time as children living in Okinawa, where their dad was stationed in the U.S. Army in the 1950s.

"Our father was stationed in Okinawa twice and we had talked about going back because the brother and sister that were on the cruise with me were born there," McDavid said. "We were flying into Tokyo, so we decided to go out two days early ... to make sure we get on the cruise ship ... and not miss the trip."

They looked forward to relaxing, taking in the sights in various port cities, and spending time together, said McDavid, who estimated she has been on about 20 cruises in her lifetime.

"We booked it early and we were blessed with an upgrade with a balcony instead of just a little porthole. So that worked out great, especially when we went into quarantine, and we were able to get outside," she said.

McDavid shared cabin C-202 with her sister; they were just four doors down the hall from her brother and his wife.

"It was a nice size room. It wasn't tiny, tiny, tiny," she said, like some cruise ship cabins can be. There were two single beds, a pair of dressers and a desk.

"There was a little room to move around, but to go from the balcony to the front door, we couldn't pass each other. Only one person could walk by."

The ship left Yokohama, Japan, on Jan. 20, headed for Kagoshima, Japan, arriving on Jan. 22.

She and her sister left the ship and walked around the city, shopping and taking in the scenery. Davis tried on a colorful Japanese kimono at a mall and posed for a photo.

For the next two days, the ship was out to sea.

McDavid recalls taking Zumba and Japanese line-dancing classes. She played games and watched performers each night who would sing or do magic acts for the guests on board.

She was impressed by the sinks set up near the buffet, where passengers were encouraged to wash their hands before loading their plates.

In Okinawa, everyone wore masks

The Diamond Princess docked Jan. 25 in Hong Kong, which is where the first person with the novel coronavirus disembarked, the cruise line would confirm six days later.

The man had been on the ship five days — since it left Yokohama Jan. 20 — likely eating at the same buffets as McDavid and her siblings and watching the same evening shows. But he never visited the Diamond Princess medical center complaining of symptoms before he got off the ship, according to the cruise line.

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McDavid and her sister got off the ship in Hong Kong, too, but only for the day to go sight-seeing.

"It was very nice," McDavid said. "There was an area where we could just walk into the city. We didn't have to take a tour. We just walked around, did some shopping, looked into the different stores."

After that, the Diamond Princess was out to sea two more days before stops in two Vietnamese port cities, Hanoi and Da Nang, as well as Taipei, Taiwan, before making its way to Okinawa.

That's what McDavid was most eager to see.

But she was surprised the ship arrived in port much later than scheduled on Feb. 1. And passengers were not allowed to leave the ship without a health screening, which made for very long lines.

It was the first real indication, she said, that something was wrong.

"This was the time when people started talking about the coronavirus," she said. "People were wearing masks. They were checking your temperature, checking your temperature again, and checking to make sure you didn't bring any food, or anything in. They had to check our passports."

McDavid wasn't aware when she got off the ship that day that the man who left in Hong Kong had tested positive for the virus and was being treated at a local hospital.

They got in line to leave the Diamond Princess about 1:30 p.m., and she said it took them three and a half hours to get off.

"For people who had booked tours, they had to be canceled," she said.

McDavid and her siblings tried to make the best of it.

"You couldn’t see anything. It got dark at 6."

They walked into downtown, and did a little shopping. Her sister-in-law spotted a KFC.

"She likes to go places and purchase things just to see what it’s like to buy something in another country," McDavid said. "So she bought some chicken. It tastes about the same," as KFC chicken in the U.S," she said, laughing. "The chicken was very good.

"But what I noticed while we were eating the chicken is that there were no trash cans. Nobody was walking and eating. Nobody was walking and drinking. You know, I felt like we were kind of out of place.

"And in Okinawa, everybody had a mask on — especially in the shops."

McDavid wore hers, too.

"I keep it in my purse, and if I hear somebody coughing or sneezing, I put it on," she said. "I wasn't wearing it like all the time (during the cruise), but I did keep it with me because each place we stopped, a lot of people did have masks on."

A few hours later, they returned to the ship, which headed back out to sea.

"Because it took so long for us to get off the ship in Okinawa, the captain said that we were going to get back to Yokohama, Japan, early. We were due back the morning of the fourth (of February), but we arrived the evening of the third so everybody could be processed to get off, they could check your temperature again, get your bags packed."

But when they arrived in Yokohama, McDavid said someone from the Japanese Ministry of Health spoke to passengers, explaining that they would have to undergo yet another round of health screenings.

Quarantined at sea

There was a knock at the door of C-202 about 5:30 a.m. on Feb. 4.

"It was early," McDavid said, and when she opened her cabin door, the three people standing in the hall were "covered from head to toe.They had plastic, and the masks, gloves. They wore a blue covering," she said. "And when they came in, they checked your temperature in your ear.

"We didn't know ... what was going on."

They soon learned that the man who'd gotten off the Diamond Princess in Hong Kong several days earlier had tested positive for novel coronavirus.

"He had gone on tours and had been on the ship all that time," McDavid said. "But that’s all they could tell us about how this may have started."

The hours stretched by with no new updates, McDavid said.

"It went on all day," she said. "We had packed our bags, and they said, put your bags back in your room."

She missed her flight home to Detroit.

It was the start of a quarantine that would last 12 days before McDavid and her siblings would join 328 Americans on State Department flights back to the United States to undergo yet another quarantine.

She and Davis passed the time watching movies, playing games, doing puzzles, exercising in the space between their beds and FaceTiming with family back home.

When they wanted to see their brother, they went onto the balcony.

"We would go out in the balcony and kind of wave," she said. "We had the same steward, so if we needed to send something to one another, the cabin steward would take it down for us."

Passengers got information every day from the captain, who, she said, "would come on, and he would apologize for the inconvenience. And, you know, say, 'I know you’re disappointed.' Every single morning when he came on, he was apologizing.

"I think the first day they announced we’re in quarantine was when we had 10 other cases of coronavirus," she said. "I thought 10 is not bad, you know?

"The next day, there were more. And then each time, the numbers kept going up and up. The next time, it was like 41. We were counting and counting and it was shocking and disappointing."

On the third day of the quarantine, McDavid said passengers were brought thermometers and told to take their own temperatures. They were given three phone numbers to call if it registered any higher than 99.5 degrees.

Hers never did.

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Her daughter, Kisha McDavid Campbell, 45, of Winchester, Virginia, grew increasingly worried as the quarantine aboard the Diamond Princess stretched on, and the case count grew.

She spoke to her mother twice a day for updates and to keep her spirits up.

"I just wanted her to make sure she kept her mask on, and she didn’t go anywhere," McDavid Campbell said, advising her mom to stay in her cabin even after cruise line offered to allow passengers to get fresh air on the deck of the ship.

"I told her don’t go," she said.

By Feb. 12, the number of cases had risen to 213 aboard the Diamond Princess, more than any other place outside China, the WHO announced.

"That’s when I got scared," McDavid Campbell said. "It was scary. ... Every day, it seemed to be more and more people."

Late that night, Japanese health authorities offered to take the oldest passengers with chronic health conditions off the ship to complete the quarantine at a housing facility on shore.

But at a healthy 72, McDavid didn't qualify.

The next day, Feb. 13, Japanese health workers boarded the ship to test passengers for coronavirus, McDavid said.

When they came to her door, McDavid opened her mouth wide and said "ahh" for the swab.

From the balcony, she and her sister could see ambulances lined up to take sick passengers off the Diamond Princess.

"There was at least one ambulance there every day, usually two," McDavid said. "But they kept a tarp over the area where people left the ship. So we didn't see them, which was good.

"You know, it probably would have been worse if we could see them. We’d have been asking, 'Did we sit by this person? Did we shake hands with this person?' So that was good. They protected anybody who left the ship. We didn't know who they were."

Then, on Feb. 15, came welcome news.

The State Department and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services planned to charter two planes to bring Diamond Princess passengers back to the United States.

McDavid was thrilled — so thrilled, she replied twice to the email.

A few minutes after she sent the second message, she got a response that said: " 'Your name is on the list. You're on the charter flight,' and we just screamed. We were so happy. That was one of the happiest moments."

But the trip back to the United States was harrowing, more so than McDavid and the other passengers would understand at the time.

The sick and healthy on the same plane

She expected lines when it was finally time to get off the ship on the night of Feb. 16.

But McDavid didn't realize that it would take hours to get from the ship to buses waiting in the parking lot outside, and hours more to get to the airport.

"The worst time during the whole ordeal was leaving the ship and getting onto the plane," she said. "When they finally called us, we had to give them our passports. They told me to go on this bus, and they told her (Davis) to go on that bus. I don’t know why they split us up.

"I was on bus three. She was on bus two." Her brother and sister-in-law were seated on yet another bus.

When McDavid boarded, she said her bus was already two-thirds full. And though health authorities told passengers to distance themselves from one another to prevent the spread of disease on the ship, they were pretty tightly packed in their seats.

A woman was coughing in the seat beside her.

"I had my mask, and I made sure I didn't touch" anything, McDavid said.

Outside the buses, there appeared to be some confusion, she said, and the waiting stretched on for two and a half hours more.

They would later learn it was because the results of the coronavirus tests they'd all taken days earlier showed 14 of the Americans who were scheduled to fly home that night had positive test results. Though they were asymptomatic, it complicated matters.

HHS and State Department officials were trying to devise a plan and decide whether to bring those Americans home or take them to a medical facility in Japan.

"I was saying, 'How much longer is it going to be?' People were getting off the bus," McDavid said. "They had to use the bathroom. You know, just about everybody is over 60. But I wouldn't get off because I didn't want anybody to leave me behind.

"They weren't keeping any names. They weren't checking to see who was getting off. So I just stayed. So after about two and a half hours, they finally started moving."

There were delays when they reached the airport, too.

"We could see two 747s, charter flights," McDavid said. "But we sat another hour and a half."

A health official boarded the bus and called three names, she said.

"He told them, 'Get your stuff. Please come forward.' And they left. No word, not knowing what's going on," McDavid said. She later determined that they might have been among the Americans with positive coronavirus tests.

"I think that's why we sat on the bus for so long," she said. "They wanted to separate the people who were definitely positive from the ones who did not show any signs of coronavirus.

"But I didn't figure that out until I got here (to California). I didn't even know they were on the plane. I didn’t know we had people positive on the plane until I got back here and heard the news."

In all, the 328 Americans on those buses were divided into two groups — 177 people were taken to Travis Air Force Base. An additional 151 people were taken to Lackland Air Force Base. And 13 high-risk patients were then taken to the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, according to the State Department.

When McDavid finally got on the plane headed for Travis AFB, she said she was relieved to see that her siblings had saved her a seat.

"Praise the Lord!" McDavid said. "They were saying that there very few seats left on the plane. You know, they were scattered. So when I got on to have my name checked, ... they had a seat for me. That was a blessing, too. And it was up front."

McDavid hurried to the restroom, "and of course there were more lines," she said. "They only had two restrooms for 171 people."

She noticed that there was a sheet of plastic at the back of the plane, but McDavid didn't think much about it until she was on the ground in California.

"I just saw that there was plastic there," she said. "I just thought it was some equipment that the plane needed. I didn't know they had people in there. I didn't know."

Had McDavid been informed that passengers who tested positive for the coronavirus were on her bus and on the plane, she would have been upset.

"But I didn't know until I got back here," she said, "and that's why they have to keep things secret. They know what to share and what not to share, which is sometimes good. Just like on the ship, we didn't see people leaving or going to the hospital because that would probably scare us, too.

"We were exposed. We were exposed because we were sitting on those buses while they were checking. ... I'm not sure how many we had, but I know there was two or three people on our bus. And they didn't have their passports and they just said, 'Come on, bring your stuff.' And that was it."

Midway through the flight home, medical personnel checked the temperatures of every passenger.

"Row by row," McDavid said. "They recorded that, and that’s when I got some chips and snacks."

Almost home, after an ordeal at sea

When the plane touched down 10 hours later in California, McDavid said she and the other passengers clapped and cheered.

"We were happy to be back on American soil," she said. "We were excited. And that's when they announced that we had to stay on board. You can't leave until CDC personnel come on and get us, tell us the rules and everything."

They were to be housed in five, two-story Wyndham Hotel buildings on the base. They could choose a double room or a single room. They'd have to remain in their rooms for 48 hours after landing and would be subject to another 14-day quarantine. And when they finally were allowed to go outside, they were instructed to wear masks and keep a distance of at least 6 feet from others.

McDavid was assigned a first-floor suite with a large living room, kitchenette, bathroom and bedroom.

"It's an apartment, really," she said. Her sister got her own room in the same building and her brother and his wife are in a building nearby.

"They have a little Army Jeep come around and about four or five people delivering the food to our doors. They knock on the doors and hand it to you. You wear your mask when you go to the door.

"The food is always hot. It's good."

She takes her temperature twice a day, and medical staff come by to record the readings.

All of them were retested for novel coronavirus Feb. 21 and got their test results Monday. Hers and her siblings' tests were all negative.

McDavid walks outside early every morning, wearing a mask and is careful to avoid others.

She knows more people who were on the plane with her have been confirmed to have coronavirus since they arrived at Travis, saying at least 19 people have tested positive of the 171 on the plane.

Still, McDavid said, difficult as the experience has been, she'd have no concerns about boarding another cruise ship.

"I think I would go on another cruise, but I'm not coming back to Japan," she said.

And she's booked her flight home to Detroit, saying with a giggle that she'll be home Monday.

"Isn't that something?" McDavid said.

Her daughter said that though the whole ordeal has been scary, it's also been a good reminder about what's important.

"Be thankful for your friends and family because they could easily be taken away," McDavid Campbell said. "Life's so short, and things can happen out of your control. You just want to live every day to the best of your ability."

Her mother is coming to Virginia on March 6 to celebrate her granddaughter's birthday, and McDavid Campbell said she already knows what she's going to do when she sees her: "I am going to give her a big hug, and try not to cry. I’ll be glad she’s there safe."

Contact Kristen Jordan Shamus: 313-222-5997 or kshamus@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @kristenshamus.