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More than 40 Americans on quarantined cruise ship test positive for coronavirus

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The largest coronavirus cluster outside mainland China was floating off the coast of Japan, and Dr. Anthony Fauci said the numbers were still climbing.

Nine days after the Diamond Princess was sealed off in Yokohama harbor, the outbreak aboard the ship had become the story dominating Sunday politics shows in Washington. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, went on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on February 16, 2020, to lay out exactly how bad things had gotten on the quarantined liner and what the government was doing about the roughly 380 Americans still stuck aboard it.

• More than 40 American citizens on the Diamond Princess had tested positive for coronavirus and would stay in Japan for hospital treatment instead of flying home.
• The U.S. organized charter flights bringing roughly 340 of the nearly 380 American passengers and crew to Travis Air Force Base and Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in California, plus Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, for a mandatory 14-day domestic quarantine.
• Total confirmed infections aboard the ship had surpassed 350 and were still rising, making it the largest concentration of cases outside mainland China at the time.

Fauci’s Message on Face the Nation

Fauci told host Margaret Brennan that the shipboard quarantine, which began off Yokohama in early February after a passenger who had disembarked in Hong Kong tested positive, had been ordered with good intentions but had not stopped the virus from spreading among the roughly 3,700 people confined to their cabins. Instead of containing the outbreak, the ship had effectively turned into an incubator, with case counts climbing day after day as Japanese health officials tested more of those aboard.

He was direct about why the more than 40 infected Americans wouldn’t be flying home with everyone else: they needed hospital-level care in Japan, not a 14-hour flight and a military-base quarantine tent.

Transmission on that ship accelerated in a way that turned it into one of the highest-risk environments anywhere outside China.

Returning Travelers Face Renewed Quarantine Mandates

The uninfected evacuees didn’t get a free pass either. Fauci explained that people who are asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic can still carry and spread the virus, which is exactly why every evacuee — not just those who tested positive — went straight into a fresh 14-day quarantine at Travis, Miramar, or Lackland upon landing in the U.S. It was a belt-and-suspenders approach: the shipboard quarantine had already shown how fast the virus could move through close quarters, so officials weren’t taking chances with domestic transmission once the charter flights touched down.

That logic reflected a broader shift in how U.S. health officials were talking about the outbreak by mid-February — treating it less as a contained, imported problem and more as something that demanded aggressive isolation even among people who looked and felt fine. Readers tracking the outbreak’s spread in the U.S. could follow the story unfold in Health News as case counts kept moving.

A Ship Turned Hotspot

The raw numbers told the story better than any single quote. Princess Cruises had first confirmed positive cases aboard the Diamond Princess in early February, and within days that handful of cases had ballooned past 350 confirmed infections among passengers and crew — a total that made the ship, by itself, a bigger cluster than most countries were reporting. For a vessel that had been quarantined specifically to stop the spread, the trajectory was the opposite of reassuring, and it’s part of why Fauci’s Sunday-show appearance drew as much attention as it did in World News coverage that week.

Roughly 340 of the nearly 380 Americans aboard chose evacuation over riding out the quarantine on the water, betting that a supervised 14-day stretch on a U.S. military base was safer than staying on a ship where the infection count kept ticking upward by the day.

Those charter flights landed at Travis, Miramar, and Lackland with more than 40 confirmed infections left behind in Japanese hospitals — and, as Fauci made clear on air, no guarantee the number wouldn’t grow before the ship’s remaining passengers were cleared to leave.