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4 Quarantined Cruise Ship Passengers Share Their Experience

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Thirty-five hundred people, one dead passenger, and a cruise ship that couldn’t come home.

For nearly a week, the Grand Princess sat idle roughly 50 miles off the coast of San Francisco, its more than 3,000 passengers and crew locked out of port while federal and state officials figured out what to do with a ship carrying the coronavirus. Four American passengers caught in the middle of it told NBC News what those days actually looked like from inside a cabin with the door closed and the television on.

• The Grand Princess was held offshore after a passenger from a prior voyage died of COVID-19 in Placer County, California, prompting the quarantine.
• Passengers were confined to their staterooms starting March 4, getting meals left outside their doors and updates over the ship’s PA system and TV.
• On March 6, Vice President Mike Pence confirmed 21 people aboard — 19 crew members and two passengers — had tested positive out of 46 test kits airlifted in by the California Air National Guard.

Locked In With No Timeline

The four passengers NBC News followed described a routine that had nothing routine about it: room-service trays left outside cabin doors, announcements piped in over the ship’s speakers, and long stretches of nothing but a TV screen to tell them what was happening a few decks away. None of them knew how long the lockdown would last when it started on March 4, and one of the four ended up receiving a personal diagnosis while still aboard — turning an already anxious wait into something much closer to home.

That uncertainty was compounded by the ship’s own recent history. The Grand Princess had continued its voyage after a passenger from an earlier trip died of COVID-19 in Placer County, and by the time California and federal officials moved to intervene, the vessel was already carrying more than 3,000 people who had no way to get off.

The Test Results That Changed Everything

The scale of the problem became clear on March 6, when the California Air National Guard airlifted 46 test kits onto the ship. Vice President Mike Pence announced the results the same day: 21 people had tested positive, 19 of them crew members and two of them passengers. For people already confined to a few hundred square feet of cabin space, the number confirmed what many had feared since the announcements started — the virus wasn’t a rumor down the hall, it was aboard with them.

Of the 46 initial test kits, 21 came back positive — 19 crew members and two passengers.

Docking at Oakland

The standoff ended on March 9, when the Grand Princess was cleared to dock at the Port of Oakland under strict containment protocols rather than a normal disembarkation. More than 2,000 American travelers were taken directly off the ship and driven to military bases for mandatory 14-day quarantines on land — Travis Air Force Base and Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in California, Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas, and Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Georgia. Crew members, by contrast, stayed aboard the ship for continued monitoring rather than being sent ashore with passengers.

The Grand Princess situation arrived amid a wider run of stories about the virus’s spread and the unpredictable behavior it was triggering worldwide, including reports of eerily empty streets in Beijing as China’s own outbreak forced its cities into lockdown weeks earlier. By mid-March, projections about where U.S. case counts were headed were only adding to the unease passengers described feeling in their cabins, with new modeling pointing to a steep rise in cases and deaths nationally.

For the four passengers who spoke with NBC News, the ordeal didn’t end when the ship reached Oakland — it just moved to a new location. Instead of a stateroom with a locked door, it was a cot on a military base with another 14 days on the clock, waiting to find out whether the quarantine had worked.