Officials at Princess Cruises say the company had learned of the infected passenger hours earlier, when they were tipped off by a news report. Before long, they received another, clearer warning, this one sent by an epidemiologist from the government of Hong Kong. But seemingly nothing was done aboard the ship that aroused the concern of most passengers, including the Four Amigos. Cruise line officials maintain that the day after the ship received the first warning, its crew began sanitizing public areas more frequently, put out extra hand sanitizer, and switched buffet utensils more often.

Of course, such measures couldn’t be expected to do much against a virus that was currently crippling China—especially on a cruise ship, an environment designed to pack people in and then entertain them with communal activities. And the virus had already had ample time to attack people’s lung cells until they coughed it into the air, where it might linger in a mist for three hours. Then, if the virions weren’t inhaled, they could still settle on an elevator button or a roulette wheel and survive up to three days, waiting to hitchhike on an unsuspecting hand to an itchy nose. At this point in the cruise, the coronavirus could be anywhere and in anyone.

On what was supposed to be the cruise’s final night, February 3, while the Four Amigos were enjoying a multicourse meal in the mirrored Savoy Dining Room, they all agreed that they hoped the trip would never end. Suddenly the ocean liner’s intercom came to life. In his Italian-inflected English, the ship’s captain told all on board about the infected passenger. Accordingly, he said, when the Diamond Princess reached Yokohama, everyone would need to stay on the vessel for an extra day while Japanese health officials screened them. The Jorgensens gave each other a look that said: What does that mean for us? But soon enough, guests went back to their surf and turf. Before long, the baked Alaska was paraded out, accompanied by marching band music and diners festively waving their napkins.

The Four Amigos soon retired, but many of the other passengers continued their evening at the Skywalkers Nightclub or took in a show at the 740-seat theater. They were still on vacation, after all. Dealing with the real world could wait.

---

2. Security

Growing up in claustrophobic Mumbai, India, Sonali Thakkar had been desperate to see the world. When a friend encouraged her to interview for a job with Princess Cruises, she hesitated. What Thakkar knew of cruises consisted of what she’d seen in Titanic—hardly an endorsement for a career at sea. But she ended up getting the job and loving it, spending her early 20s pinging between continents as a security patrolwoman aboard several Princess ships. The long hours she spent managing the gangway—monitoring those who boarded and disembarked—could be taxing, but after her shifts, she’d visit the top deck to take in the panoramic view of the ocean or a glamorous port city and the stress would melt away. Besides, she’d happily put up with a lot for the chance to earn about twice what she’d make at home.

Not long after the captain’s announcement, the 24-year-old Thakkar received an urgent call ordering her to the gangway. She had been off duty, but the ship had sped up to reach Yokohama early and now the city was in view. Soon she was standing at the weakly illuminated gangway, squinting into the liquid dark of the harbor while the ship anchored slightly offshore.

It was freezing outside, and down here by the waterline, Thakkar could hear none of the cheer of the parties going on hundreds of feet above. Her radio crackled, announcing the approach of several small Japanese boats, which drew alongside the hulking ocean liner. Even before the captain’s announcement, the crew had heard rumors of an infection, but Thakkar claimed that management told them not to worry. Now, as she counted roughly two dozen Japanese health care workers in protective gowns and masks being helped aboard by deck hands, she began to get an inkling of how bad things might actually be.

The Japanese officials were marched directly to the captain’s office. Not long before midnight, the captain reportedly returned to the intercom, finally ending the night’s revelry, ordering everyone back to their rooms.

In the morning, the Diamond Princess was subdued. The ship idled close to shore but never touched the pier, as if landing might infect Japan. Some of the guests still circulated between the restaurants, but many stayed close to their rooms as the Japanese health care workers fanned out across the ship to assess the virus’s spread. Passengers, including the Four Amigos, expected to disembark the following day. But when the next morning came, the captain’s voice again rang out from the speakers barnacled to the walls and the ceilings. Nine passengers and one crew member had tested positive for COVID-19. All passengers were to return to their cabins, where they would remain quarantined for two weeks by order of the Japanese government. Rather than release 3,700 potential vectors—who could infect Japan or their farther-flung homes—public health officials were transforming the Diamond Princess into a floating quarantine center.

Thakkar was given a mask and a new set of duties: patrolling the hallways in her naval-looking uniform. Guests would open their doors and, from their thresholds, ask what was going on. But all she could tell them was to go back inside and remain calm—she didn’t know anything more herself. Of course, Thakkar was concerned about contracting the illness. But she also told herself that she was no longer the timid girl who had never left India: She was a Princess Cruises security person, and she was going to do her duty—even if that had unexpectedly changed. Once she had guarded the passengers from the outside world; now she was protecting it from them.

---

3. Inside

As Hong Kongers, Yardley Wong and her husband had been aware of the outbreak before many others on the ship—and the loss of a close friend to SARS, a similar virus, 17 years earlier, primed them to take this outbreak seriously. The 40-something couple had worn masks and practiced some social distancing measures since the start of the cruise; after the captain’s announcement, they locked themselves away in their cabin, even as many guests still roamed the ship.

While they waited anxiously for the Japanese health care workers to reach them, they ordered room service, and when it arrived, they sanitized the utensils before eating. Sometimes Wong heard the crinkle of plasticky protective gear in the hallway, and through the peephole in the door, she glimpsed blurry figures in surgical masks and gowns—though they always passed by.

Finally, around 11:30 p.m., officials arrived to take their temperature—and found no sign of fever, though it was hard to tell because the couple and the health workers barely spoke a common language. Wong and her husband went to bed thinking they were okay, but were woken by a knock at 4:30 a.m. This time the figures at the door had upgraded to hazmat gear: face shields, goggles, and shoe coverings. They swabbed the Wongs’ mouths. Wong then watched as her sample was inserted into a tray alongside what seemed like a hundred other vials—and she wondered what these tests meant about the virus’s spread. The pair managed a few more hours of restless sleep, until they were roused by another announcement from the captain. Everyone, he told the ship, would need to remain inside their cabins for the whole two-week quarantine.

For the Wongs, the world shrank to a room of about 150 square feet, much of that taken up by a queen-size bed. The cabin’s primary decoration was a big TV and two large mirrors hung facing each other to create the illusion of spaciousness. There were no windows, and this relatively cheap room was about as far from fresh air as possible: on an interior hall of a middle deck, near the laundromat. This wasn’t the sort of cabin highlighted in advertisements.

Wong and her husband might have endured this confinement easier if they hadn’t been traveling with their then six-year-old son, who was sharing their bed. To occupy him, they had the TV and an iPad, on which he played Fortnite. At first they used in-room exercise routines to burn off his energy, before passengers were eventually granted an hour each day on deck, during which time they tried to run him ragged while carefully staying six feet away from others.

But they couldn’t divert their boy’s attention from the fact that the situation was quickly worsening. On the second day of the quarantine, the captain announced that the number of cases had doubled to 20. The following morning, February 7, there were 61. Fear stuffed the cramped room. The family still hadn’t heard back about the results of their tests and had to hope that no news was good news. Infected passengers, they had grasped, were being taken off the ship. Through their peephole, the Wong and her husband had watched neighbors be escorted down the hall with hastily packed bags by men in hazmat suits, presumably en route to Japanese hospitals.

The couple was terrified about what would happen if one of them tested positive. They were caring not only for their son but also Yardley Wong’s elderly parents in the cabin next door. The family worried about whether her frail father could survive an infection. A single vent supplied the Wongs’ room with air, which was so dry, Wong said, “you could make Italian cured ham with it.” The desiccated oxygen was giving her family raspy coughs—or was that the coronavirus?

Wong distracted herself by helping others. Using her fluency in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, she acted as a one-woman switchboard for older passengers who didn’t know how to use the internet, taking messages from family and friends via social media and then relaying them through the ship’s telephone lines. She appreciated that Princess Cruises was trying to ease the situation, making the ship’s usually expensive Wi-Fi available for free and offering psychological counseling over the phone. The company had already promised to refund the trip and pay for guests’ journeys home. Still, passengers were growing restive, blaming the cruise line for everything from a lack of clean bedsheets to lost medications, including essentials like insulin.

Meanwhile, Japanese officials were struggling with their response. Lacking enough kits to test everyone on board, they reportedly left feverish Americans in their cabins for multiple days before finally sending them to hospitals where they tested positive. Passengers were given N-95 masks and alcohol wipes, but this seemed risibly inadequate, given the rapidly growing number of infections. Day five: 69. Day six: 135. Many passengers felt underinformed, left to glean details from news reports based on leaks from the Japanese health ministry. Some hung banners off the side of the ship—one apparent bedsheet was painted with the plea for help: “Serious lack of medicine, lack of information.”

Eventually, Wong’s son asked her, “Am I going to get it?”

Normally, Wong would have tried to ease his worry, but she couldn’t deny reality. “If either of us gets it, we may not be able to see each other for a while,” she said. Her son started crying.

Later he said, “Mama, I don’t want to be here anymore. I just want to go home.”

Now she wanted to weep. “Just a few more days,” she promised him. “Just a few more days.”

---

4. “The Passenger Is King”

From the glass-walled bridge of the Diamond Princess, Captain Gennaro Arma endeavored to protect the souls entrusted to him. He had brought them to harbor but not yet to safety. Arma had been with the cruise line for more than 20 years and looked like the movie-star version of a gracefully aged captain. He’d grown up on the Italian coast, enchanted by his seafaring family’s stories, and landed a job as a Princess Cruises cadet not long after graduating from maritime school. He rose rapidly through the ranks, and when the Diamond Princess made its maiden voyage, in 2004, Arma was its senior second officer. By 2018, he was the captain, steering the vessel through typhoons by pointing the bow into the oncoming storm.

Arma was undaunted by high-stakes challenges—in fact, he relished them. But this was unlike anything he’d faced before. And now, rather than having the absolute authority that he typically had at the helm, he was following orders from both the Japanese government and his corporate command chain. He was working, he later told me, with “no playbook, no dedicated training, no dedicated protocol.” With the aid of Japanese officials and his crew, Arma was essentially trying to convert his ship into a colossal luxury hospital and oversee the logistics of food delivery, sanitization, and health care for a small city. In his daily P.A. announcements, he exhorted guests and crew alike to rise to the challenge, repeating the motto that it was only through pressure that coal became a Diamond Princess.

Most of the 1,045 crew members responded with enthusiasm to Arma’s leadership—at least at the beginning. Kitchen staffers pivoted from restaurant service to delivering three meals a day to 1,337 cabins. Dede Samsul Fuad, a gee-whiz 28-year-old Indonesian dishwasher, worked 15-hour shifts, scraping food off plates and steaming them in an industrial dishwasher. He had heard of doctors in Wuhan falling sick after working too hard, but the motto drummed into him by supervisors had always been “The passenger is king.” Fuad, Thakkar, and other members of the crew I spoke with took sincere pride in working hard during such a time of need. But it was also true that being a dishwasher or security guard on the Diamond Princess was a dream job that they couldn’t afford to lose—as it was for the other Indians, Indonesians, Filipinos, Ukrainians, Hondurans, Venezuelans, and other citizens of 48 mostly developing nations who made up the majority of the ship’s frontline staff.

Though masks and gloves were handed out, the crew had little training in dealing with a disease of this virulence. “Anybody would be scared for their life, because day by day more and more people were getting infected,” said an Indian crew member who asked for anonymity, as did other staff, afraid of retaliation from Princess Cruises. “And we knew people were dying.” The Indian man described colleagues delivering food and then running back to their cabins to jump into scalding showers or wash their hands in hot water until they hurt. As the days dragged on, the service workers began to question if their sacrifices were worth it.

Another Indonesian dishwasher described watching the virus tear through the large kitchen where he worked shoulder to shoulder with some 150 people—a number that declined as fewer showed up for work. A little less than a week into the quarantine, he started feeling ill. He wasn’t sure it was coronavirus, but he decided to quarantine himself in his tiny room for 15 straight days, reasoning that if Princess Cruises couldn’t protect him, he’d protect himself.

Most of the crew were housed in quarters beneath the passenger decks. There were no giant windows with sweeping ocean views, no scintillating chandeliers. Hallways with exposed piping led to small rooms packed with bunk beds. The crew could quickly tell that their home was becoming a hot spot, especially the mess hall, where more than a hundred people at a time might visit the buffet. Later, a report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention validated this fear, noting that in the early stages of the outbreak three-fourths of all the infected crew members were food-service workers—employees who could easily spread the disease to other crew and passengers.

Some staffers tried to take whatever precautions they could. An Indian man told me that he ate only packaged foods—and boiled all his own drinking water in his room with an electric kettle—and avoided getting sick. But he was lucky, and some of the employees accepted getting infected as inevitable. As the CDC report would later show, not long into the quarantine the disease was infecting more crew than passengers, who were hidden away in their cabins while the staff kept working.

For government officials and corporate leaders, the question of whether it was fair—or even safe—to quarantine the passengers but not the crew was obscured by the priority to keep the ship operational. And so the poor took care of the rich, and the citizens of less powerful nations served those from more powerful nations, and the Diamond Princess remained a miniaturized version of the global order—because what other way could things go?

Once all the passengers had been trained to stay in their rooms, Thakkar returned to her normal post at the gangway, where her main activity was now counting the infected passengers as they were escorted off the ship. Most of the infected walked to waiting ambulances, but some left on stretchers. On the eighth day of quarantine, she counted 39, bringing the total to 174. A native of the tropics, Thakkar had bundled up for the northern winter, but by the end of that shift, she was shivering—and coughing. She called the ship’s doctor, who ordered Thakkar to isolate herself in her windowless cabin.

Eventually, she tested negative, but her roommate was found to be positive and was taken away. Thakkar was left to worry what her own symptoms meant. She dreamed of home and the aloo paratha her mother made. On her phone, she scrolled through headlines about the virus’s dangers. Quarantines, it was becoming clear, are designed to protect only those on the outside—those on the inside have to fend for themselves.

Thakkar decided to take the situation into her own hands. She video-called an Indian news station. “We are requesting for help from Indian government,” she said in accented English, her face hidden by a surgical mask, her eyes bright with fear. She and other staff “do not want to stay in the same environment that we are, since we have found out there are coronavirus-infected people.”

Thakkar wasn’t the only one desperate enough to launch this kind of modern SOS, as a fellow Indian, a cook, had already been issuing video appeals via Facebook to the prime minister of India. Fuad, the Indonesian dishwasher, who was so resolute at the start, would also later beg his government to rescue him.

In making her plea, Thakkar joined hundreds of others broadcasting from the Diamond Princess, some with serious messages, others using their moment in the historical spotlight to write reviews of their every meal. Indeed, many passengers essentially streamed life on the inside with their smartphones. And what wasn’t being FaceTimed up close was being captured from afar by TV cameras set up onshore. Helicopters buzzed the ship and literal boatloads of journalists pulled alongside as international interest in the ordeal intensified. The world couldn’t look away because the coronavirus was now surfacing in scores of nations, and it was becoming clear that what Thakkar and the rest were suffering might provide a glimpse of what everyone would soon endure. Indeed, the number of Diamond Princess cases was exploding to such an extent that by day nine, when it reached 218, the ship had more cases than every nation in the world except China.

---

5. The Suite View

Six decks above where Thakkar was entombed, the Goldmans and the Jorgensens watched the drama unfold from their neighboring mini-suites. On their combined balcony, they had a view of men in hazmat suits marching passengers to ambulances, but it didn’t seem likely to them that they’d get sick. They were the kind of seniors who hit the gym rather than putting on pounds by the pool during cruises, who always took the stairs, and who still seemed to have more vigor than many people half their age.

Certainly the quarantine was an inconvenience: They had to frantically shuffle schedules and delegate business tasks back home. But they were able to work remotely, even if they had to wake up at 2 a.m. to account for the time difference. Otherwise, the quarantine had its bright spots: Fancy meals were dropped at their door, the balcony provided ample fresh air, and thanks to being in connected quarters, their best friends could come over whenever. Both couples’ suites contained two areas, each with its own TV, an essential convenience for the Goldmans, who could never agree on whether to watch sports (Carl Goldman) or the Hallmark Channel (Jeri Goldman) and would otherwise have (somewhat) jokingly bickered over the remote. Ultimately, the Americans recognized they were lucky, and they were determined to look on the bright side of things.

This mindful optimism was actually the origin of their friendship. The Goldmans and the Jorgensens had met about a decade before at a motivational life-coaching training. Together, all four now subscribed to a set of teachings that boiled down to “the law of nonresistance,” as they described it—fundamentally, making the best of the current moment. They had all used it to overcome the doldrums of middle age, and the Jorgensens taught a bit of it in their rehab center. Now, as Jerri Jorgensen said, “this is a chance for me to see if I’m ready to live what I’m teaching.”

To stay fit, they made an obstacle course and raced through their joined rooms, and they washed their laundry in the bathtub to reduce the workload on the crew. The four shared a similar, zany humor, and the husbands played goofballs to their deadpan wives to relieve everyone’s anxiety with laughter. Carl even began blogging his upbeat perspective of life on the ship: “My wife’s reaction to the toilet paper” being delivered “was like giving her a diamond ring.”

Unlike Thakkar, they never feared for their lives or livelihoods. They were healthy and had American passports and successful businesses, and a senator’s aide had personally assured them that their situation was being monitored. But as the four watched a movie on the evening of Valentine’s Day, not long before the quarantine was scheduled to end, Jerri Jorgensen became feverish. They didn’t call the ship’s medical center, figuring they’d see how she felt the next morning—and by then she was better.

Coincidentally, a knock rattled the door that morning. Several days earlier, the Jorgensens had been swabbed because Mark was taking immunosuppressants for a kidney transplant, putting him at increased risk for the coronavirus. Now the test results were being delivered by Japanese health workers in hazmat gear. They didn’t speak English, so they thrust a piece of paper toward Mark, showing a positive result. “Wow, okay, when do you need me?” Mark said. But the masked head shook no. It was Jerri Jorgensen who was being summoned. Jerri: a mountain biking and workout fanatic, who had her white hair done up in a fauxhawk, the Amigo who had always been the healthiest. On day 12, she became one of the 285 positives from the Diamond Princess.

Jerri wasn’t given long to load a backpack. She chose not to take anything sentimental—just her passport, wallet, some toiletries, and a book called The God Who Weeps. It taught an appropriate lesson for the time, she said, that “God is not this ruler with a magnifying glass, waiting for us to screw up so he can zap us, but sympathizes.”

It wasn’t an option for Mark to join her, and when the time came, Jerri told him, “See ya when I see ya,” trying to lighten the moment. Then, following the law of nonresistance, she let an ambulance bear her away, telling herself: Next adventure! She watched out the window as they drove four hours beyond Tokyo’s conurbation. The day darkened. Streetlights sharpened. She had no idea where she was being taken.

Not long after she left, the remaining Amigos found out that all of the 428 Americans aboard the “floating petri dish,” as Carl called it, were going to be evacuated by the United States government. Mark considered rejecting the offer, but eventually he and the Goldmans decided that there was no point in him waiting; he wouldn’t be able to see his wife in the hospital, anyway—and he could always fly back if she took a turn for the worse. For the first time, Carl’s lighthearted blog took on a dark tone. “We are shaken and devastated that we have been removed from our friend,” he wrote. “The next league of our journey may take days. I am uncertain when I will be able to post again.”

---

6. The Hot Zone

Even before the world’s attention fixated on the Diamond Princess, Dr. James Lawler knew what was coming. Lawler, a director at the Global Center for Health Security, had previously worked on pandemic preparedness in the White Houses of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. As disturbing data had begun emerging from Wuhan, Lawler and numerous other infectious-disease experts and senior government officials had kept up a worried discussion on a private email chain titled “Red Dawn.” On January 28, while most of the world was oblivious to the exploding pandemic, Lawler had written darkly: “Great Understatements in History…Pompeii—‘a bit of a dust storm[,]’ Hiroshima—‘a bad summer heat wave[,]’ AND Wuhan—‘just a bad flu season.’ ”

But what, exactly, the federal government should do about the emerging pandemic, as well as the Americans trapped in increasingly dire straits on the Diamond Princess, was unclear. By early February, the Trump administration’s Coronavirus Task Force was debating responses to the spiraling catastrophe. The CDC recommended not bringing the American passengers home—the thinking being that they might carry the disease with them to the United States, which still had very few confirmed cases, and Japan could capably handle the quarantine.

But as the number of infected ship guests exploded, one American passenger, Arnold Hopland, called his friend, Republican congressman Phil Roe of Tennessee. Hopland is a doctor, and his detailed testimony of the unfolding disaster convinced Roe that action needed to be taken. At a congressional briefing about the coronavirus, Roe managed to catch the attention of Robert Kadlec, a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services, with promises of an “ace in the hole on this ship” who could offer “on-the-ground” intel.

An international conference call was arranged in which Roe and Hopland spoke with senior officials from the Trump administration, the CDC, and the State Department. From his room on the ship, Hopland made the case that he and other Americans could be safely repatriated and then quarantined in the United States. If they weren’t evacuated soon, he argued, they would be in danger. Congressman Roe backed Hopland up. “I’m an old country doctor,” said Roe, who once practiced as an ob-gyn, “and I was like, ‘Let’s get them off, or they’ll be infected.’ ” Kadlec and the others were convinced.

When the government decided to act, officials knew exactly whom to call: James Lawler, who combined years of scientific expertise with field experience in the world’s most dangerous hot zones. Along with a Harvard physician, Lawler took the reins of a squad of 15 professionals from Federal Disaster Medical Assistance Teams. Officials from the United States and Japan had already been discussing disaster-evacuation scenarios in preparation for the scheduled Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Now they activated those protocols to smooth the American medical team’s arrival. On Friday, February 14—around the same time Jerri Jorgensen was developing her fever—Lawler and his team assembled in the lobby of a Yokohama hotel.

Their plan was to test all the Americans aboard the Diamond Princess for the coronavirus—and then, 72 hours later, fly at least the uninfected ones out on chartered cargo jets. Those who tested positive would presumably be transferred to Japanese hospitals.

On Saturday morning, Lawler and three other American physicians followed a Japanese doctor onto the Diamond Princess. They were wearing special helmets and breathing oxygen fed from hoses via their hip-mounted respirators—high-end machines called PAPRs that Lawler considered so important that he had made a stopover in Los Angeles to acquire them on his way to Japan. But through his face shield, he watched their street-clothed guide “screwing around with” his surgical mask, surprised that another medical professional could be so cavalier.

As they marched through the cruise ship galleries—eerie as a circus turned into a crime scene—he noted that some of the Japanese health workers were not observing quarantine protocols. While a portion were outfitted in hazmat gear, others were simply wearing blue bonnets and surgical masks. He spotted passengers moving freely around some parts of the ship, and regularly clothed crew, wearing only masks, swabbing down the hallways. No wonder the disease had continued its wildfire spread. He began to worry about the Japanese health workers who were shuttling between the ship and the pier where the rest of his team waited. As soon as he disembarked, he warned the Americans to isolate themselves as best they could and to keep six feet away from the Japanese health care workers at all times.

Lawler wasn’t the only one who considered what he was seeing dangerous. Kentaro Iwata, an experienced Japanese virologist who visited the ship, later broadcast a video in which he described the quarantine as “completely inadequate in terms of infection controls.” Ultimately, at least six Japanese bureaucrats came down with the virus from the Diamond Princess, as did a Japanese health worker. And Japanese officials eventually acknowledged the quarantine was flawed.

On Saturday afternoon, Lawler learned that the evacuation planes previously scheduled to arrive Monday night were now going to be on the ground the next day—Sunday. His team’s ambitions to test everyone were reduced to making sure that all the passengers were healthy enough to endure long, uncomfortable flights home on cargo jets.

The next day, Sunday morning, Lawler’s response team divided into three units and spread out across the ship, checking the American passengers. Lawler estimated that he walked ten miles that day in his heavy gear. It was around 10 p.m. when Lawler tracked down the last American, in the crew quarters. When Lawler exited the Diamond Princess, his countrymen were filing off the ship in a cold rain, their luggage hauled toward a line of buses by Japanese in hazmat suits. Dozens of Americans decided to stay behind for various reasons, but those consenting to be evacuated were now headed to the airport.