Michael Dorety News Today

Amina Khan, and it’s Wednesday, Dec. 23. This newsletter will be taking the rest of the week off for the holidays, so here’s the latest on the pandemic, plus some of the week’s best stories to take you through the long weekend. Newsletter Get our free Coronavirus Today newsletter Sign up for the latest news, best stories and what they mean for you, plus answers to your questions. Enter email address You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. As c...

We called it Voyage of the Damned: Days of despair on the Grand Princess Christopher Goffard © (Noah Berger / Associated Press) Passengers aboard the Grand Princess celebrate as they arrive in Oakland on March 9. The cruise ship, which had maintained a holding pattern off the coast for days, carried multiple people who tested positive for the coronavirus. (Noah Berger / Associated Press) Michael Dorety was a retired 68-year-old Dallas firefighter who had the long-standing men...

Michael Dorety was a retired 68-year-old Dallas firefighter who had the long-standing mental habit of calculating catastrophes, the better to avoid them. He sat by exit doors. He refused to book 11th-floor hotel rooms, because engine ladders only reached 10. He taught his kids to avoid escalators, which could snag shoelaces. Yet Dorety showed no alarm when he and his wife, Susan, climbed aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship at Pier 27 in San Francisco on Friday, Feb. 21, joining some 2,500 pas...