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Closed for 48 hours, Adriano just wants to get off the ship but ″ the hospitals are full ″


Adriano Maranhão, 41, a plumber on the cruise that has been docked in a Japanese port since the beginning of February and, so far, the only Portuguese diagnosed with the new coronavirus, still does not know when he will receive treatment.

It is already night in Japan, when Adriano talks to us. He knows it because he saw the time, he has no other way of knowing: “I can’t see the day or the night”. Infected with Covid-19, Adriano has been in a cabin for 48 hours, where no one enters and no one leaves. He can’t wait to leave, but he still doesn’t know when he can. As he has no symptoms – besides his tired body, which he attributes to the stress created by the fact that he has been contaminated by a “new disease” – his case is not urgent. “The Portuguese embassy in Tokyo told me this morning that the hospitals are overbooked and that I must leave here on Monday or Tuesday. But it was not right. It seems to me that it can stretch another day or two,” he tells JN .

Even given the lack of places in Japanese reference hospitals, the chance that Adriano will be treated in Portugal will be out of the question (Europeans who returned home on planes chartered by European Union countries were not infected). JN contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to find out what steps are being taken to get the Portuguese out of the ship as soon as possible, but still has not received an answer.

The “Diamond Princess”, where Adriano has worked as a plumber for five years, was placed under quarantine by the Japanese government on February 5. At the time, it hosted about 3700 people, of which more than 600 were infected. Since last Wednesday, when passengers whose diagnostic tests had been negative began to disembark, 970 have left. On board, there are still about a thousand crew members, including Adriano and four more Portuguese, that the Directorate-General for Health has already confirmed that they are not infected with Covid-19, which does not guarantee that they will not be – questions were raised about the rigor of the protection measures after 23 passengers were allowed to leave without being properly analyzed (one of them was diagnosed three days later).

It was precisely the Portuguese camaraderie, with whom he speaks daily on Facebook, that got away with Adriano when he got tired of eating the cookies he had in the cabin. His colleague and friend Sérgio, with whom he also shares the land of Nazaré, prepared a tray with food. “The company only left me a tray at the door after I spoke to the President of the Republic, who spoke to the embassy about the food problem. Later, they told me that they had not come to give me food because they did not have the food. information that I was in isolation “, he reports, pointing out flaws in the way the outbreak is being managed, especially with regard to the crew. “The crew member is a number in here, it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, if another one leaves,” says Adriano, who has been trying to contact the American Princess Cruises, to get answers, but nobody answers and nobody answers the e -mails.

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