Diamond Princess

And I also started like trying to squash the media narratives that kept coming out about, you know, how awful everything was.

So for example, they, They ran the Diamond Princess story wall to wall until we found out that it wasn't really that bad.

And then they forgot about the Diamond Princess cruise ship story, right? I

don't know anything about the Diamond Princess cruise ship story.

I guess I missed it.

Yeah, that was the first cruise ship to get a COVID outbreak.

Correct.

Yeah.

So one of the craziest COVID stories happened, I think this was probably February, 'cause we definitely were not on lockdown yet, and I was still on the air multiple times a day 'cause COVID was definitely ramping up.

The Diamond Princess cruise ship was kind of one of the biggest stories in the world at the time, and on one particular day, there was a major meeting of the biggest executives and anchors at ABC News.

And when I say executives, I mean Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, and Bob Chapek, the new CEO who was about to replace or was replacing Bob Iger as CEO of Disney, were in town from the West Coast.

They were in New York City, and there was a meeting with the top anchors at ABC News and some more Disney executives, and I was asked to sit in on this meeting in this conference room.

Now, if you envision a conference room that's, like, a square or a rectangle, and there's a giant conference table around it, and of course, Bob Iger and Bob Chapek and various other top Walt Disney executives and ABC News anchors are seated around the conference table.

Then there's an outer perimeter of chairs that are around the room, and I am sitting at the last chair next to the door.

So I was barely in the room, and I'm listening to this meeting all about COVID, also asking, "Why am I in this room?" You know, it's towards the end of the hour, and Bob Iger turns to me and says, "Jen, would you mind sharing your thoughts on what's going on with the Diamond Princess cruise ship and what your opinions are of the current situation with respect to COVID and our Disney cruise ships, which are out at sea?" And I thought, "Am I hearing things, or did the CEO of The Walt Disney Company just ask me that question?" I could not believe it.

So as I was explaining it, that was really one of the moments that I thought to myself, "If the CEO of The Walt Disney Company is asking for my analysis of this situation," A, that's the kind of CEO Bob Iger was.

Yeah, I was working for Princess Cruises during COVID.

The Diamond Princess, people remember, was the boat had an outbreak and ports wouldn't let it dock.

Yeah, we couldn't get in to get the passengers off, so we had to isolate all the passengers on board, and everybody had to be isolated on board.

So, yeah, I managed to get off, actually, before quite a few of the passengers.

Go away.

The outside world was looking at it because it's peak pandemic terror.

And the Diamond Princess became a byword for, you know, this is a hell ship.

Yeah.

So you have a very, very highly transmissible disease.

It has this age stratification, which you could see from the Diana Princess data in terms of the risk of death.

And you could see that it already had spread everywhere from international reports.

The lockdown, whatever China did, it already failed even before they'd started it.

know what they're talking about.

Can I ask you about the Diamond Princess? When the Diamond Princess docked and we had this COVID outbreak, It made everyone, especially in the media, wet the bed because all of a sudden we've got death and destruction and everyone's got COVID.

In many ways, the Diamond Princess was a Petri dish, but a wonderful lesson about the virus that we should have heeded and we didn't see the lesson.

It was the perfect example that we were not dealing with anything that vicious on a population scale that needed any population scale measures like lockdown and all these things because the death rate was very low.

This was a large number of people all exposed.

So if you were infected, we encouraged people to wear a mask so you didn't infect other people.

Then the Diamond Princess came in the middle of February and the Japanese government actually asked us to help them.

And so I sent a team from CDC to go on the Diamond Princess to try to figure out what was going on with COVID on the Diamond Princess.

And, you know, I didn't know if the Chinese were right about no asymptomatic infection or not.

no human to human transmission because they didn't really let us come in and investigate with them.

When the masking looked like a reasonable alternative, did you know that the virus was aerosolized at that point? Or were you thinking more droplet?

I thought in general that we were looking at droplet.

Although when we saw what happened on the Diamond Princess, there was one piece of information that was really suggestive of aerosolization.

He joined Princess as a cadet in 1988 and became a captain in 2015.

Arma became widely known as the captain of the Diamond Princess during the COVID quarantine back in Japan in 2020.

More recently, though, he helped oversee the construction of the Sun Princess and Star Princess and served as captain when Star Princess entered service last year.

Captain Arma said he's closing his princess chapter but did not say he is retiring.

And usually, if someone knows you're ill, someone can do something about it.

In January 2020, a passenger who had been infected with a novel coronavirus boarded the Diamond Princess.

He left the ship in Hong Kong on January 25.

By the time the ship returned to Yokohama in Japan on February 3rd, public health officials were already trying to understand what they were looking at.

Roughly 3,700 people were now part of one of the earliest major COVID outbreaks outside mainland China.

A cruise ship had become a case study.

So when you think about something like Diamond Princess at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, what did it teach the world about quarantine, asymptomatic spread, uncertainty, the virus itself?

Yeah, I still so vividly remember the days when we had this list of most affected countries.