Coronavirus Latest: Cruise Ship to Dock in Oakland Monday. Sonoma County Testing to Ramp Up.

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The giant cruise ship whose passengers have been in limbo for days due to coronavirus concerns, will be allowed to dock at the port of Oakland on Monday.

The Grand Princess, with more than 3500 passengers and crew on board, has been circling offshore of San Francisco for days, as California and federal authorities worked out where to send it, and how to process those on board.

The ship will be under quarantine after arrival, with groups of passengers allowed to disembark slowly, in stages in a process overseen by authorities from the federal Centers for Disease Control.

The most ill passengers will leave first and be transported to hospitals across California for treatment in isolation. California residents who don’t require immediate treatment will go to a federally operated isolation center at an as yet undisclosed site, to be tested for the coronavirus in isolation.

Other U.S. citizens who are not California residents will be transported to care facilities in other states for testing and, if necessary, treatment.

According to reports, the crew will be quarantined on board the ship and be tested there. No word, as yet, as to where the many passengers from other countries will be taken once they leave the ship.

Helicopters delivered test kits to the ship on Thursday. Of the 45 passengers and crew tested, 21 were found to be infected with the coronavirus. There has been one fatality traced to a passenger on the ship, a 71 year old from the Sacramento area who died last week. Princess Cruises announced today that they believe that man may have been sick with the virus before departing on the Mexican cruise on February 11th.

Sonoma County has begun to test locally, after the delivery of a test kit to the county health department on Friday. The kit reportedly contains enough materials to conduct 220 individual tests, and 14 tests can be done each day.

Once testing ramps up, results should be available more quickly, in approximately 24 hours. Previously local officials were forced to wait days before results were returned from a state lab. Sonoma County has requested additional kits, and hopes to soon have the capacity to test 900 patients.

Local health officials hope to expand testing in order to catch patients earlier, and isolate them from the general public. Up until now, local health officials have had to receive permission from the CDC before requesting that a patient be tested.

Meanwhile, health care providers have begun to gear up for a possible influx of cases, with hospitals erecting special facilities like outdoor tents to process possible coronavirus cases, while keeping them isolated from the general public and other hospital patients and staff.