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Coronavirus Canada
This Week in AsiaHealth & Environment

Coronavirus: fears rise as Westerdam cruise passengers return to US, Canada and Europe

  • Health authorities are scrambling to put in place measures to screen cruise passengers
  • Operator Holland America said no one on the ship was ill when it docked in Cambodia after being rejected by other countries

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The MS Westerdam is docked in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. International health authorities scrambling to track passengers out of concern that their possible exposure to the virus would escalate the international spread of the new coronavirus. Photo: AP
Meaghan Tobin
Retired American nurse Paulette Schaeffer returned to Las Vegas over the weekend after the cruise ship she was on, the MS Westerdam, docked in Cambodia on February 13 after being rejected by five ports over coronavirus fears.
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She told the Las Vegas Review Journal that she and her husband Joseph had an eight-hour layover in Singapore before flying to Los Angeles, from where they drove home to the state of Nevada. They had already gone to the Costco supermarket and were running other errands, confident they did not have the coronavirus that has sickened over 73,000 people and killed more than 1,800 worldwide.
The virus was the reason the Westerdam, which had left Hong Kong on February 1 for a 14-day cruise, could not call at its scheduled ports and was effectively a pariah ship with no destination, until Cambodia allowed it to dock.

Schaeffer said they had at least three health checks on the cruise ship, where guests answered questions about their physical condition and had their temperatures taken to make sure they were not running a fever, a defining symptom of the Covid-19 disease that is caused by the virus.

“They were very thorough,” Schaeffer told the Journal.

But one of their fellow passengers, who was among several hundred guests who left Cambodia on Sunday, tested positive for the virus while on transit in Malaysia. The 83-year-old woman is receiving treatment, along with her 85-year-old husband, who has pneumonia.

The discovery has left international health authorities scrambling to track guests from the Westerdam out of concern that their possible exposure to the virus would escalate the international spread of the disease that has afflicted mostly people in mainland China and parts of Asia.

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