The Grand Princess cruise ship sits off the coast of San Francisco, Mar. 8, 2020. The Grand Princess cruise ship set to dock at the Port of Oakland in California on Monday. Some 19 crew members and two passengers have tested positive for the coronavirus, and all the passengers will now have to undergo quarantine. Twenty Chinese nationals including 11 crew members and nine passengers are on the ship. (Photo: China News Service/ Liu Guanguan)

 

 

The US Navy's state-of-the-art hospital ships can't do much to help the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) stricken Grand Princess cruise ship because they simply cannot quarantine thousands of people, experts said on Monday.

The experts' assertion came after the cruise ship, which has been drifting off San Francisco for days due to the virus outbreak on board, finally docked at a port in Oakland on Monday, 

The Grand Princess cruise ship is carrying 3,535 passengers from 54 countries. Of the 45 passengers who took sample tests on Friday, 21 turned out to be COVID-19 positive, as the whole ship was exposed to the virus. The passengers are to leave the ship for quarantine, reports said.

The US is obviously attempting to avoid another Diamond Princess, the COVID-19 stricken cruise ship docked in Japan that quarantined passengers on board instead of letting them get off, eventually causing a significant increase in the number of patients, analysts said.

Reports previously speculated that hospital ships could be used to transfer its passengers, as some said this would prevent COVID-19 patients from going ashore and spreading the virus on land.

The US' Mercy and Comfort are considered the world's largest and most advanced hospital ships. They have been modified from oil tankers, built with helicopter flight decks, equipped with all sorts of advanced medical equipment and have thousands of sickbeds.

However, they were not used to transfer Grand Princess passengers because they are not designed to quarantine infectious disease patients, an expert who had previously boarded the Mercy told the Global Times on Monday.

Hospital ships are designed with war casualties in mind, as their functions mainly target surgical diseases and normal illnesses, not infectious diseases, the expert said, noting that although the Mercy has a quarantine zone, it is small with only a few dozen sickbeds, far from enough to hold thousands of people.

The ship is airtight and the ventilation system runs throughout the ship, which is not conducive for quarantine since it is very easy for cross infection to take place, the expert said.

A hospital ship is definitely more suitable than a cruise ship, but it needs to build an entire system to target infectious diseases including rebuilding quarantine sectors, rearranging medical personnel and letting more specialized doctors on COVID-19 to replace surgeons, the expert said.

This cannot be done in a short time, so using hospital ships was not a realistic option for the US, as it had to let the Grand Princess passengers go ashore for quarantine.