Grand Princess passengers still haven’t been tested for coronavirus

But as the end of this week approached, some passengers said their repeated requests for testing have gone nowhere, making them anxious about whether they have the disease that has so far afflicted more than 128,000 people in a global outbreak that this week was declared an official pandemic.

These passengers are among many Americans struggling to get diagnosed. The nation has been unable to get a handle on the crisis due to a calamitous shortage in COVID-19 tests, despite promises by various Trump administration officials that tens of thousands of tests would become available this month. Cases in the US have so far exceeded 1,600, including 40 deaths.

In a phone interview Thursday night, Salli Spoon of Crockett, California, said that passengers were first told they’d get tested prior to disembarking. “We initially were told that the testing would be before we got off the Princess,” Spoon, a 72-year-old retired Amtrak employee, told BuzzFeed News. “That did not happen.”