BANGKOK, February 11. /TASS/. The government of Thailand has refused the Westerdam cruise liner entry to Laem Chabang, a scheduled port that the ship has been heading to, Thai Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul wrote on his Facebook page on Tuesday.
The top health official said that he had handed down a directive to the authorities to refuse the ship’s docking at the Thai port.
On Monday, Westerdam’s operator Holland America Line said that on February 13, its passengers would come ashore in Laem Chabang, after which they would be able to fly home from Bangkok. The ship is not quarantined, the company emphasized.
The cruise ship with 1,455 passengers and 802 crew on board left Hong Kong on February 1. It was planning to call at a number of Japanese ports - on Ishigaki Island, in the city of Naha (Okinawa Prefecture) in the south of the country, as well as Nagasaki and Hakata Bay (the city of Fukuoka). Yokohama was its port of destination, from where a new tour was scheduled. These plans were aborted upon insistent demands from Japan, because it feared that some passengers or crewmembers on board could have been infected with the pneumonia caused by the novel coronavirus.
On December 31, 2019, Chinese health officials reported a cluster of cases of acute respiratory illness to the World Health Organization in Wuhan, an economic and industrial metropolis with a population of 11 million. The virus - 2019-nCoV, otherwise known as the novel coronavirus - was identified on January 7, 2020. Apart from China, over 24 other countries, including Russia, have reported confirmed coronavirus cases. According to the latest data, the overall number of people who contracted the novel coronavirus in China has exceeded 43,000, more than 1,000 people have died and over 4,000 have recovered.
The World Health Organization declared the new coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, describing it as an epidemic with multiple locations.