PORTLAND, Ore. — A Forest Grove woman with the coronavirus showed her frustration in a video she posted from her hospital room in Tokyo.
KGW spoke with Rebecca Frasure over Skype from her hospital room, where she has been isolated and separated from her husband for over a week.
Her tone was much different than it was when we spoke with her last week, when she was feeling more hopeful and optimistic.
Hundreds of Americans she was with on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan were evacuated. Monday morning, they arrived back on U.S. soil.
Rebecca has been separated from her husband Kent after testing positive for coronavirus while on board the ship. She is one of more than 450 infected passengers.
For the last two weeks Kent has been stuck on the ship, docked in the Japanese port city of Yokohama, under mandatory quarantine.
"Listen, the U.S. government needs to come back and bring us home. They left 40-plus Americans in Tokyo to, what, rot? Until they bring another plane back in two weeks? No," Frasure said in the Facebook video.
Rebecca is understandably angry with her situation; she and her husband Kent are in the dark about what's next.
Rebecca feels all governments need to rescue their patients, with extreme caution.
The U.S. government whisked more than 300 Americans off the cruise ship and put them on flights back to the states. The Frasures didn't join them. Because Rebecca continues to test positive, she remains in quarantine at the hospital while Kent is still stuck on the ship. She says he won't leave her behind.
"I am very much asymptomatic. Yes, I'm testing positive but clearly they had a way to keep folks separated on that plane. So they could have taken me home and others in my same boat," Frasure told KGW.
Fourteen evacuated Americans tested positive for coronavirus just before boarding flights home. The Japanese Health Ministry said 99 more people on board got infected.
"I was really frustrated and disappointed at first and now I'm just angry, to be honest," Rebecca said over Skype, "I'm angry the government didn't think this through, I'm angry they didn't communicate it well and I'm angry they continue to not communicate well."
Feeling abandoned, she reached out to the U.S. embassy in Japan to tell them Americans need to be flown home, but hasn't heard from anything for days.
"If we don't hear something soon it's going to be chaos, it's already chaos," she said in her Facebook video. "This is ridiculous. The ship is unsafe at this point. Princess did all they could but there is something driving that virus to spread like wildfire."
Rebecca works in customer service for Providence Health Plans and her job requires she stay even-keeled. But as the days in isolation add up, it's clear that's becoming difficult.