California family trapped on cruise ship by coronavirus now faces ‘a waiting game’
Most people wish their vacation would never end. Not the Gleasons of Rocklin, not anymore.
Nineteen days ago they boarded the Grand Princess in San Francisco for a Hawaiian Island cruise, the first cruise for their two daughters, Evelyn, 9, and Natalie, 6.
“It was fun, we did the whole thing in Hawaii, then we got stuck,” Kaylen Gleason said Monday morning via phone from the ship, now docked at a secured and guarded location at the Port of Oakland. “Now, it’s a just a waiting game.”
They are still on board, locked in their 10-foot by 12-foot cabin with a small (unopenable) window facing the Bay Bridge, waiting for the knock on their door from someone to tell them they finally can leave.
Their vacation floating home, now essentially a prison, has become one of the outbreak epicenters for the new and frightening coronavirus pandemic, which started two months ago and has spread internationally.
At least 21 people on board the ship have tested positive for the virus. That forced the ship to sit in limbo for five days off the California coast, passengers sequestered in cabins, while federal and state officials wrangled to put together a plan to get the ship home while making sure its occupants don’t spread the virus after disembarking.
The ship docked in Oakland on Monday and the disembarkment began, first with sick passengers headed to the airport, then with out-of-state passengers headed to planes to take them to federal facilities for quarantine.
The Gleasons have been given a number. It’s “Silver 4.” When that number is called, hopefully sometime Tuesday, they say they expect to be loaded onto a bus and ferried to a military facility, probably Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, for another two weeks of confinement.
The good news: “We are all healthy as far as I know,” Gleason said. Their throats are a little irritated from breathing days of air conditioned air, though. “We’ve gotten a lot of quality time together. The kids have had our full attention.”
Cruise ship quarantine tough
The daughters have been “such good girls. They have helped me stay calm,” she said.
Emotionally, though, it’s been tough. They have no free will, and are at the whim of national health officials who appear to change their minds frequently. Even the ship captain is frustrated and has repeatedly apologized via updates on speakers piped into each cabin.
They have had to do more than a few in-family counseling sessions in the last few days as the experience wears on them.
On Saturday, they were allowed to go out on deck for 20 minutes for the first time in five days, but they had to wear face masks and were ordered to stay six feet away from others. It was visually startling and “psychologically strange,” and it momentarily got to their 9-year-old daughter. She said she felt she couldn’t breath. The mask felt suffocating.
“We came back to the room. We wondered, ‘Is this physical or emotional?’” Gleason said. “She was getting concerned: ‘What if I am sick?’ She ended up being fine. We had to have a long, long talk and help her understand why we need to be here longer even though we are not sick. It took a lot of coaching.”
Gleason, who plans to restart yoga teaching soon, says she needed an emotional pep talk herself from her husband, Jacob, who works for a grocer chain. But it was hard to do that in the room with their daughters. They used a bit of coded language, and he helped her see their situation as not the worst thing possible.
They are healthy, and they are all together in this. It would have been very tough to be separated. “We trust God is in control here. Faith helps us stay grounded. We agree we are safe. And the kids are safe and we are feeling fine.”
Now, she says, they are prepping themselves mentally for the next two weeks, although they do not know what that will be like. Their main hope, she says, is to be allowed outdoors, and to exercise.
“We don’t know what (the land quarantine facility) looks like. We know we can’t avoid it. We have been preparing the kids and our hearts. We have been discussing how it is hopefully better than being stuck in a cabin without air.”
This story was originally published March 10, 2020 at 12:07 PM with the headline "California family trapped on cruise ship by coronavirus now faces ‘a waiting game’."