After all, we all know that a cruise is a nice, quiet relaxing way to spend a nice vacation.
And in these tense days, surely you want to join me on a nice cruise ship,right?
There are plenty of options available:
Here’s the sales brochure which I received today from
the travel agent who booked a cruise for my family a few years ago.
It’s from the Holland America cruise line—the same company who just today brought a ship to dock in Florida carrying four dead bodies and a couple hundred passengers infected with Covid-19.
I was flabbergasted.
At first I thought it was a joke, but no…this is real.
Well, in fairness, according to the article the bookings are pretty much for 2021, when most people are expecting this crisis to be over (one way or another) and I imagine cruise lines are cutting rates like crazy to bring people back…but yeah, strange time to be advertising it…
Hmmm…wonder if Rhine river cruises for June 2021 are being advertised…
It occurred to me a while back that the smart move, right now, for the cruise companies would be to convert their fleets into hospital ships. They already have a fair bit of medical facilities on board, given the usual age demographics they cater to. They have plenty of beds. And governments would probably pay them a reasonable amount for it-- Probably not as much as they’d get for pleasure cruises in normal times, but a lot more than they’d get sitting rusting in the harbor for lack of demand.
My parents, both 70+, just canceled this year’s trip to France. Now they’ve booked a trip in 2021 that includes a river cruise in Provence. They got a 25% discount; I would have held out for more.
I was planning an Alaskan cruise next year, but that’s on hold for now.
Cruise ships really don’t have much medical infrastructure. They basically get you off the ship at the next port and it’s no longer their problem. And their HVAC system spreads airborn pathogens, rather than protect people in staterooms from pathogens. Unfortunately, the ships aren’t great for that purpose.
We’re still booked on a cruise in Sept - whether it goes is still TBD. But I get emails and I keep looking for future cruises. Why would I stop, any more than I’d refuse to go to theaters or the library or a restaurant or any other gathering place once this is over? I certainly don’t intend to spend the rest of my life in isolation.
I’ve done enough cruising that I’m on the mailing list of just about every line in the world, and the brochures have just begun to slack off. The last ones I saw had only a few cruises listed.
Viking at least is sending virtual links to online tours and things, all free.
Same. Because of our history of cruising, we would expect to get at least 5 brochures a week in the mail from various cruise lines. It has definitely tapered off.
We just cancelled one we had booked for the end of May. They might be back in business by then, but I think we’ll still be dealing with all of this at some level at that time.
Because cruise ships have a well documented history of being incubators for viruses. There were many cases before the current corona virus, but the last few weeks have not been great advertisements for cruise ships. Add to that the suspicion all cruise ships are under now when they come back to port with anyone sick, the risk of quarantine is higher.
I would agree that cruise ships are not a good idea for COVID-19/other infectious/contagious patients. I could see them being useful for other types of patients. My sister is currently in hospital recovering from a hip replacement and two subsequent fractures of the femur around the implant. Her actual medical needs are pretty minimal. What she needs is support care and physical therapy. A cruise ship could serve quite well for her and for other patients in similar conditions.
If a cruise ship could be quickly pressed into service in this way then it may help by taking pressure off regular hospitals and generate some good PR for the cruise lines.
Cruise ships are really not set up as medical facilities for dealing with infectious patients and aerosolized pathogens, which requires negative pressure quarantine spaces, decontamination and clean zones where medical personnel can ungarb, dual swing doors that can open in either direction without having to hold them open and fit two gurneys side by side, and of course all of the medical equipment like radiographic imagers and CT scanners, respirators, cardiac care equipment, autoclaves, et cetera as well as the bioinfomatics infrastructure to monitor and track patients. The ships may have “plenty of beds” but they are mostly in small cabins with a limited amount of floorspace that is not conducive to moving medical equipment and gurneys around. Pretty much the only facilities that large cruise ships have of use for a hospital are the large laundry and food preparation facilities, which are easy enough to improvise on land. Ships are also a nightmare for contagion even in the best of circumstances (hence why you see stories every year about a norovirus or influenza outbreak on a cruise ship) and absolutely terrible for this type of virus with its high latency and rapid transmission; essentially every medical person on the ship could be virtually guaranteed to be infected (which is probably the case anyway). To make cruise ships suitable for use as hospital vessels they would essentially have to be gutted and rebuilt from the hull inward, which the US no longer has the means to do in a rapid timeframe.
The USN hospital ships send to New York and Los Angeles (Comfort and Mercy) are being sent explicitly to treat non-COVID-19 presenting patients, although with the lack of rapid testing they are almost certain to become infected shortly as well. Both ships are dedicated hospital ships (converted from retired super-tankers) but they are nearly fifty years old and like every other ship in the US Navy they are understaffed, intentionally in this case because the expectation would be to backfill staff in wartime or crisis with reservists, but those same reservists are likely busy treating patients in their civilian jobs right now. The purpose of those vessels really is intended to support mass casualties from the battlefield or disaster relief efforts for a short term until patients can be moved to permanent facilities, and thus do not have all of the facilities that a normal civilian hospital would have for long term care. This was really a token effort that looks good in the news but will have little impact overall on overwhelmed hospitals and medical staff.
Although there is much being said about how hospital beds are overflowing, that is really the easiest problem to solve; the bigger problems are equipment (not only ventilators but all of the cardiac care, monitoring, and other basic medical supplies), personal protective equipment (PPE), and of course the experienced medical personnel themselves who are already starting to get sick in significant numbers and will further overstress the system until they recover (and some will not, which is obviously terrible for morale of the remaining medical personnel). We can erect tent cities and improvise elevated beds far more quickly than we can produce masks, sterilize and refurbish equipment, or somehow make more medical personnel. Ships don’t really help with that and the logistics of working on a ship just compound the supply and hygiene problems.
I am a bit claustrophobic and I really do not like crowds. Getting on a boat with 3500 other people, even before the Mexican Beer Virus, would have never happened. Now, I would need two tickets to go: One for me and one for the guy holding a gun to the back of my head to force me up the gangway.
My wife is the same and has never had a problem. A decent sized stateroom has plenty of room, and the only crowded places are the buffet line and the lifeboat drill.
Not that I’d want to go anytime soon.
My family has tickets for a May 2021 cruise. Granted, they were ordered last fall, but buying for that far out really isn’t a bad idea, nor is it uncommon when it comes to cruising.
Would like to see a cite for the the bolded statement. One from a qualified source.
On another cruise-related board, this statement is thrown about quite a bit and regularly shot down by a chief engineer who worked on cruise ships. He went into great detail describing the technology. His facts are, of course, frequently disputed by posters who have no knowledge on the subject.
[Purdue University: “Cruise ship AC systems could promote rapid coronavirus spread, prof says”](Cruise ship AC systems could promote rapid coronavirus spread, prof says)
*According to a Purdue University air quality expert, cruise ship air conditioning systems are not designed to filter out particles as small as the coronavirus, allowing the disease to rapidly circulate to other cabins.
EXPERT: Qingyan Chen, Purdue’s James G. Dwyer Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has researched the spread of air particles in passenger vehicles and how to track them. His team developed models in the past for showing how the H1N1-A flu and other pathogens travel through aircraft cabins.*
Depends upon what region of the ship they are talking about. Your link seems to have a problem but the person I referred to address the issue several times, here is one of his responses.
Air recirculation in common areas are problematic (as they would be in any anywhere) but cabin air is a different story. Not filtered but isolated.
Even with ventilation from outside air (for the cabins that have balconies) the possibility of an aerosolized pathogen entering a cabin and certainly the public spaces is very high. Basically, cruise ships (and enclosed transportation in general) is the perfect environment for an infectious pathogen.
I would avoid large cruise ships like the literally plague they are, even aside from their ecological and social impacts. They are conspicuous overconsumption made reality.