Cruise ship passengers recall deaths, confusion, quarantine
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The last vacation Margrit and Lucio Gonzalez took together began with an ominous delay: a medical emergency on the cruise ship they were set to board.
After a four-hour wait, the couple of 51 years got on the Grand Princess on Feb. 11, 2020, for a round-trip voyage from San Francisco to the Mexican Riviera, a decision Margrit Gonzalez came to regret.
“I wish we had come back home. He would still be alive,” the 82-year-old said.
Within weeks, the Grand Princess had captured the world’s attention and made the coronavirus real to millions in the United States when thousands of passengers on a subsequent trip were quarantined as the ship idled off the California coast.
A year later, some of those who traveled on the Grand Princess remember the pain that followed, others the frustration of shifting directives as they were confined to their rooms. They now realize they had a front-row seat to a historic moment.
Ultimately, more than 100 people who were on the ship were infected with the coronavirus. At least eight died.
One was Lucio Gonzalez, an athletic 73-year-old who had worked maintaining trails in the California Parks system for 25 years. On the sunny afternoon they boarded, the Gonzalezes thought only of their high-seas adventure. But a few days after the trip ended, Lucio Gonzalez started feeling ill. Eventually, he went to the hospital.
“They put him on a ventilator for three weeks and two days, and after that he died,” his widow said. “I never saw him alive again.”
Hours after the Gonzalezes disembarked on Feb. 21 in San Francisco, a new group boarded for a 10-day trip to Hawaii. The Grand Princess was headed for a stopover in Ensenada, Mexico, when officials ordered it to reroute to California on March 4 after a 71-year-old...
