Virus-hit cruise ship passengers face wait in California port
OAKLAND, United States — Passengers waiting to disembark from a coronavirus-hit cruise ship in California faced frustrating delays Tuesday, despite US President Donald Trump saying the operation was going "incredibly well."
The Grand Princess arrived at a sealed-off wharf at the port of Oakland in San Francisco Bay on Monday after days stranded at sea with 21 confirmed infections on board.
California Governor Gavin Newsom admitted the start of the operation had been slow, with just 676 people taken ashore by early Tuesday afternoon from roughly 2,400 passengers.
"We're going to need to see an increase in those processing in order to turn this ship around," he told a news conference. "We don't want to see it here for more than a week."
Trump earlier told a White House meeting that the "big ship that came in yesterday" was "going along incredibly well."
Health Secretary Alex Azar said it was "a very complex operation" but "progressing well," with all Californian residents expected to leave the ship Tuesday.
Two people infected with the virus were among those immediately taken for medical care in ambulances, overseen by emergency workers equipped with gowns, gloves, respirators and face shields.
After an overnight pause, more masked passengers were escorted in small groups from the Grand Princess to ambulances and waiting buses Tuesday.
"The captain said they hope to have us all off by tomorrow night," passenger Carolyn Wright, a 63-year-old from New Mexico, told AFP.
"We are getting really frustrated that they still have not told us where our ultimate destination will be," she added.
Princess Cruises, the operator, said the evacuation would be a "multiple day process."
'Isolate'
US residents leaving the ship were to be quarantined for 14 days at military bases in California, Texas and Georgia.
But doubts emerged after Nevada unveiled its own plan to bring all 49 of its passengers -- who do not have symptoms -- directly to the state for quarantine at their homes.
"We have received confirmation from the federal government accepting all the conditions" of the plan, the Nevada governor's office said in a statement.
Passengers who were taken to hospital but found to be stable will be quarantined in hotels and motels throughout California, Newsom said.
Foreign passengers were being flown to their home countries.
Canadian Foreign Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said 228 Canadians were repatriated and would be quarantined for two weeks after landing at the Trenton air force base.
The 19 crew members who tested positive for coronavirus did not have symptoms and remained on the ship Tuesday, in isolation in their cabins, Princess Cruises said.
Newsom said the original plan to quarantine all crew on the ship once it leaves Oakland was being reconsidered. Some members of the crew -- which is disproportionately Filipino -- could instead be repatriated, he said.
A Florida couple travelling on the Grand Princess filed a $1 million lawsuit against the ship's operator alleging negligence.
Princess Cruises had "exposed plaintiffs to actual risk of immediate physical injury," a copy of the complaint filed at a Los Angeles court Monday said.
Newsom said it was now "incumbent upon seniors and those with any medical conditions, not to go on cruise ships, and to begin to socially isolate themselves from larger crowds."
Some 28 people have died of the coronavirus in the US, with almost 1,000 cases reported according to a Johns Hopkins University tally. — with Andrew Marszal in Los Angeles
Follow this page for updates on a mysterious pneumonia outbreak that has struck dozens of people in China.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says on Sunday that he had contracted COVID-19, testing positive at a key point in his flailing campaign for re-election.
Hipkins saYS on his official social media feed that he would need to isolate for up to five days -- less than two weeks before his country's general election.
The leader of the centre-left Labour Party said he started to experience cold symptoms on Saturday and had cancelled most of his weekend engagements. — AFP
The World Health Organization and US health authorities say Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown.
The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance "due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries", it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday.
So far, the variant has only been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. — AFP
The World Health Organization says on Friday that the number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80% in the last month, days after designating a new "variant of interest".
The WHO declared in May that Covid is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing occasional spikes in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
In its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80% increase compared to the previous 28 days. — AFP
The head of US intelligence says that there was no evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in the Chinese government's Wuhan research lab.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with COVID-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community (IC), the ODNI report says some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to COVID-19. — AFP
Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Covid lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street when he was prime minister, a UK parliament committee ruled on Thursday.
The cross-party Privileges Committee said Johnson, 58, would have been suspended as an MP for 90 days for "repeated contempts (of parliament) and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process".
But he avoided any formal sanction by his peers in the House of Commons by resigning as an MP last week.
In his resignation statement last Friday, Johnson pre-empted publication of the committee's conclusions, claiming a political stitch-up, even though the body has a majority from his own party.
He was unrepentant again on Thursday, accusing the committee of being "anti-democratic... to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination".
Calling it "beneath contempt", he said it was "for the people of this to decide who sits in parliament, not Harriet Harman", the veteran opposition Labour MP who chaired the seven-person committee. — AFP
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