Scottish cruise couple saw passenger fall down dead at their feet on virus-ridden ship

An Edinburgh couple confined to their cabin on a coronavirus-ridden cruise ship in Italy have told of their nightmare journey and failed attempts to get home.

Billy Shaw and his wife Carol's trip around the Caribbean and across the Atlantic on the Costa Luminosa was set to be trip of a lifetime with friends.

But the dream quickly turned sour when a fellow passenger dropped down dead at the couple's feet while the ship toured the Caribbean.

Now as the virus has spread among fellow passengers and crew, the pair are confined to their cabin and are becoming increasingly worried for their own lives.

Billy Shaw and his wife Carol talk of their nightmare experience being confined to a cabin on a virus-ridden ship

Speaking exclusively to the Evening News last Carol, 56, said; "We just want to get home to our family.

"This has been a nightmare. We have been confined to our cabin for a week now with next to no information on the tannoy.

"It started going wrong before that though. We were having a drink in the bar when the boat was in the Caribbean when a guy fell down dead right in front of us.

"We are both medically trained and we both tried to work on him while we waited ten minutes for the paramedics to arrive but I could tell he was dead.

"The captain saw us two days later and said 'thank you' and that we had saved his life and that he was recovering in Grand Cayman. I just called him a liar there and then to his face. That man was dead."

The couple, from Stockbridge, were celebrating Bill's retirement as an HGV driver and flew to Fort Lauderdale, Miami to join the ship on a cross-Atlantic voyage to Venice.

But days later the ship had to disembark two passengers in Puerto Rico who were later diagnosed with coronavirus. It also unloaded four sick passengers on the Spanish Canary island of Tenerife.

Their plans of disembarking in Malaga were thrown into disarray as the virus spread.

Before docking in Marseille, the Costa Luminosa, operated by Italy’s Costa Cruises, a subsidiary of Carnival Corp, had declared to authorities that 75 people had symptoms of the respiratory disease or had been in contact with people with it.

A mass evacuation of passengers on Thursday and Friday found 36 people on board infected with the coronavirus.

One passenger, a Swiss national aged more than 70, has been transported to a Marseille hospital.

A Marseille area prefecture spokesman confirmed that among those allowed to disembark on Thursday and Friday were 235 Americans and 77 Canadians, who were taken by bus to Marseille airport, from where they flew to Atlanta. Five of the passengers on that flight had symptoms of coronavirus, according to the prefecture.

Ten Spanish nationals were taken to the airport for a flight to Barcelona, while 187 French nationals were taken home by bus.

The prefecture said that all passengers who disembarked - with or without symptoms - were provided with facemasks, which they had to wear until they could be confined in their homes.

It took so long to medically test and disembarked 639 of its 1,421 passengers in Marseille that the pair missed a rescue flight which had been hastily prepared for them.

The ship had last night moved on to the port of Savona in northern Italy, the heart of the outbreak in Europe, where more people were being disembarked.

Carol said: "I was going crazy yesterday.There have been announcements for Swiss, Canadians, Americans but no news at all for the British. The British rep has been as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike.

"I am worried now for Billy, he is diabetic and only has tablets for another day."

The couple's daughter Sarah, 24, urged authorities to help her parents get home.

She said: "We are all worried sick for them. We just want them home now and we need someone in power to help us."