What’s it like living with a coronavirus infection, isolated in a biocontainment unit? For Carl Goldman, diagnosed this week in Nebraska, his condition doesn’t feel any different from a typical cold, he told NPR’s Noel King. But the treatment is unusual: Doctors visit him each day wearing hazmat suits, and hospital staff wave at him from behind double-sealed windows.

Goldman arrived at the University of Nebraska Medical Center on Monday, after being evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, where more than 620 passengers were infected with the coronavirus.

The cruise through Southeast Asia was a gift for his wife, Jeri Seratti-Goldman, for Christmas and her birthday. As owners of a local radio station in Santa Clarita, Calif., the two were looking forward to a break, but it didn’t turn out quite how they hoped. “Who knew we were going to end the cruise in beautiful Omaha?” Goldman says.

The couple left California for the 16-day cruise on Jan. 17. But then, about two weeks in, they got bad news. The ship’s captain reported that a passenger who had already left the ship was diagnosed with the coronavirus.

The captain doubled the ship’s speed, rushing back to Yokohama, Japan.

Instead of getting off the ship, passengers were tested by Japanese health officials and were told they couldn’t leave their cabins. They were kept aboard for 12 days to try to contain the disease.

Food was delivered three times a day by crew members in masks and gloves. The couple entertained themselves by reading and watching movies. From their room, they could see ambulances carry away sick passengers.

Goldman and his wife were able to leave their rooms and visit the ship’s deck only three times during those 12 days under quarantine, Goldman recalls. The couple’s suite had a balcony, but not all the passengers had one. “We were one of the lucky ones,” he says.

The U.S. State Department chartered flights to bring home many of the Americans on the ship. It wasn’t until their flight back to the U.S. that Goldman started feeling sick.

“When we were flying back from Japan to the States, about two hours into the flight, I woke up with a high fever after napping a little bit,” he says.

Along with 12 other infected evacuees, Goldman was flown to Omaha, Nebraska. When the flight landed, he asked to ride shotgun in the ambulance but was denied. He tested positive for the coronavirus. He is recovering in a biocontainment unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where he’ll have to spend 14 days in isolation. The unit is a separate area in the hospital with its own ventilation system and security.

His wife doesn’t have the infection. She is now in a different wing of the same hospital, though she doesn’t have the virus.

Doctors in hazmat suits check on Goldman each day, he says. “I’ve got a little cough still … my voice is a bit raspy, and I’m a little fatigued, but that may be also because of the jet lag and the travel and everything else on top of it,” he says. “It doesn’t feel any different than recuperating from a regular cold.”

As of Tuesday, he reported that his vitals are strong. “They’re giving me a lot of Gatorade,” he says. He is not taking any medication, but many monitors surround him, with tangled wires attached to his body.

It’s not completely clear why Goldman got sick while his wife avoided the virus, even though they were sharing a cabin. The answer might just be luck, says Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“In any kind of viral infection, there’s always a wide range of responses, almost like a bell-shaped curve,” he told NPR.

Some people have no symptoms at all, while a fraction have more intense reactions, he says.

Elderly people or individuals with certain chronic conditions may be more vulnerable, Fauci says. But “there is no virus that has a 100 percent attack rate,” he adds. “Even the most infectious of all viruses, like measles, doesn’t get 100% of vulnerable people.”

While he has been infected, Goldman has been getting warm wishes from friends, he says — including some he hadn’t heard from in decades. Goldman has been reporting about his experience on his radio station’s website.

Though he knows there’s no treatment currently, Goldman hopes that he and other COVID-19 cases in the United States will give doctors more data to study the disease. “Each case gives them a little bit more information,” he says. “It’s going to be a learning experience for everybody.”

Elena Renken is an intern on the NPR science desk.

Updated at 2 p.m. ET

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in South Korea has doubled in just 24 hours, to 104 from 51, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. Many of the new cases of coronavirus are linked to a Christian sect in Daegu, a city in southern South Korea.

Korea’s CDC says a woman who became the country’s 31st confirmed patient on Feb. 18 had attended services held by a religious group called the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, The Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony.

The woman, who was born in 1959, had visited Wuhan, China — where the novel coronavirus was first discovered in December — the KCDC says. It adds that she was reported to have 1,160 contacts – by far the most of anyone on its list of patients.

“The church has shut down” because of the outbreak, NPR’s Anthony Kuhn reports from Seoul. “Daegu has closed some public facilities,” he adds. “A U.S. Army garrison in Daegu restricted travel in and out of the base and imposed a quarantine on personnel who had visited the church.”

In a message posted online, the Shincheonji church expressed deep regret over the coronavirus cases. It also said it’s cooperating with authorities and is spending several days sterilizing its buildings in Daegu.

The same woman who attended the church also visited Cheongdo Daenam Hospital, which has emerged as a second cluster of infections. Patients and staff there are being tested for the respiratory virus, and the hospital is being disinfected, according to the KCDC.

South Korea is also reporting its first coronavirus-related death — and the patient was from the Cheongdo Daenam Hospital cluster. While the 63-year-old man had tested positive for the virus, the exact cause of death was still being investigated, the KCDC says.

More than 75,000 COVID-19 cases have been confirmed worldwide, according to a disease-tracking dashboard created by the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering.

The virus has killed more than 2,000 people — most of them in China’s Hubei province, the center of the outbreak. Globally, nearly 17,000 people had recovered from the illness as of Thursday afternoon ET.

2 Diamond Princess passengers die after contracting COVID-19

Two Japanese passengers who had been on the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship have died after being infected with the novel coronavirus. Japan’s health ministry says the male and female passengers were hospitalized last week. They were both in their 80s.

The man and woman are the first Diamond Princess passengers to die during the virus outbreak. The cruise ship has been under a quarantine at Yokohama’s port near Tokyo since Feb. 3.

Both of the passengers died about a week after tests confirmed they were infected with the respiratory virus. The male passenger was from Kanagawa prefecture and the female passenger was from Tokyo, the health ministry said. It added that while the man died from COVID-19, the woman died from pneumonia.

A total of 634 people from the Diamond Princess have tested positive for COVID-19, the Japanese agency said. More than half that number are identified as “asymptomatic pathogen carriers,” meaning that while they don’t show signs of the illness, they can still transmit the disease to others or become sick themselves.

The deaths were reported as the shipwide 14-day quarantine expires and as the governments of Hong Kong, Australia, Israel, Canada and other countries work to repatriate their citizens. Like the Americans who recently arrived in the U.S., those passengers face new quarantines back home.

When passengers test positive for the novel coronavirus, they’re taken off the Diamond Princess and sent to local hospitals. Those diagnoses also reset the 14-day quarantine period for their traveling partners and close contacts.

About 3,700 passengers and crew were aboard the ship when it initially arrived at the Yokohama terminal. That number is now dropping by the hundreds