Cabin fever: life aboard the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship
- Hong Kong traveller Yardley Wong became the voice of the passengers through social media
- For others on board, she became a link to the outside world – and helped lead a mutiny
It’s 3am on a mid-February night, and Yardley Wong is trapped in a windowless ship’s cabin, unable to run from an enemy she can’t see, with crew members standing outside in the hall like prison guards.
Staring at the walls for three days and nights, she and her family have tried to overcome their fears. Wong, 43, has spent the time frequently washing her hands with soap for 20 seconds and checking her temperature every hour. She has sprayed disinfectant on the family’s clothing and shoes, and scrubbed their phones with an alcohol solution because “the phone is the most dirty place”.
The coughing and agony of those it has already infected echo down the hall and resonate in her heart. “This virus is real,” she muses on her Twitter account, @yardleywong, unaware that these difficult days will stretch from three to 30. “Life is so fragile. All great memories seem to shatter when life is under threat.”
It is not clear when the novel coronavirus came aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship to infect more than 700 passengers and crew and kill at least eight.
Researchers know the virus was in Tokyo on January 18, infecting more than a dozen taxi drivers at a yakatabune riverboat party. It was becoming more widespread in China, which reported 198 cases on January 19 and 291 the day after. By then, “super-spreaders” were infecting clusters of people in mainland China, Japan, Iran, South Korea, Italy and elsewhere.
