By: Fedor Zarkhin
https://muckrack.com/fedor-zarkhin
A Forest Grove woman says the United States deserted her and her husband by not taking them home while evacuating hundreds of other Americans from a cruise ship quarantined in Japan with a major coronavirus outbreak.
“All right people,” Rebecca Frasure wrote Monday in an email to the U.S. Embassy in Japan. “Enough is enough! I know you evacuated most Americans last night, but you ABANDONED the rest of us here with nowhere to go!”
Frasure, 35, was on the ship Diamond Princess when she tested positive for the coronavirus, Covid-19. The disease has killed more than 1,000 people and has infected tens of thousands more, mostly in China.
Since the diagnosis, Frasure has been at a Tokyo hospital while her husband, Kent, has remained on the ship.
The U.S. government offered to fly Americans on the Diamond Princess to military bases for further quarantine, but Rebecca Frasure said the embassy in Tokyo told her in an email that she couldn’t be one of them because she was sick. Kent Frasure decided to stay with the rest of the people left on the ship to be near his wife.
Then, she found out that 14 coronavirus-infected Americans were among those evacuated, even though only healthy people were supposed to leave. The sick passengers were allowed to board planes back to the U.S. because they had no symptoms, the U.S. State Department said. They were kept isolated on the flight.
All of the passengers are now going through a 14-day quarantine at Travis Air Force Base in California and Lackland Air Force base in Texas.
Rebecca Frasure, meanwhile, will be at the hospital until at least Friday, she said. That’s because she needs to have two back-to-back negative tests for coronavirus, and those are scheduled for the end of the week.
In a video she posted Monday on Facebook, Frasure unleashed her frustration with American officials.
“The U.S. government needs to come back and bring us home,” she said.
The last she heard, the U.S. won’t be sending another charter plane to pick up Americans until March 4.
“There’s a way to do it,” she said in the video. “And they need to figure out.”
https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/02/this-is-unacceptable-oregon-woman-with-coronavirus-in-japan-says-us-abandoned-her.html