It’s not a 100k a month dementia ward, but most people enter assisted living looking for cooking, cleaning, security, and a staff that is used to dealing with the elderly. Plus no keeping up a home, mowing, shoveling snow. They also have fairly easy medical services.
I have already booked a 3 week cruise in December to South America and Antartica. It will also include viewing of the eclipse which I am really looking forward to.
The cruise line is bending over backwards to make it easy to cancel. I’ll keep an eye on health developments, and if it isn’t safe to go, we won’t.
I love cruises. It’s like a hotel that moves… I unpack once, I have access to restaurants or room service. Someone else cleans. I don’t have to drive. The kids have activities, if they don’t want to hang out with us. I get to visit beautiful places. Plus, I love the sea. I do pick my cruise line carefully. I don’t want the gigantic roller coaster ship, I’m not looking for the young adult party ship, and I do care about safety records.
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What you’re describing is an independent living senior community - which have much lower fees (closer to the price of an ordinary apartment - I’ve seen some for $1500/month) than assisted living facilities (which provide help with daily activities like bathing, dressing, using the toilet and medication management) which seem to start at around $5000/month to share a room .Cruising full-time is not going to be cheaper than that $1500-$2K apartment that includes meals and housekeeping. I occasionally consider cruising full time once I retire, and I figure the cruise fare along will cost me nearly $4K a month per person.
I have seen ships where you buy a cabin. Ongoing fees, but you basically retire onto the ship. You can take your pets (within reason.) Apartment with sea views. I think the basic buy in was of the order of a few million. Not for me, but I could see the attraction.
How they cope with the very elderly is another matter. They are not going to be able to set up for serious care. Passengers with growing dementia would be a seriously difficult problem. As would other growing medical needs.
You might be able to sign up up for burial at sea 
But many folks won’t want to go to a floating hotel; that’s essentially what a cruise is. I think you’re more on target with the homeless shelters. Except, TPTB haven’t ever shown much interest in home-ing the homeless.
Luckily there’s another much-loathed population the TPTB are interested in housing. Prison inmates. Be on the lookout for Sing Sing of the Seas, Penitentiary Princess or The Spirit of San Quentin.
This. Security is actually not all that good, but Security Protocols make appear as such. ( See articles on weapons carried right onto planes, etc. ) However, this isn’t a hijack. ( 
)
Pre-COVID. LaGuardia Airport. 6:09 a.m. on a Monday morning. The security lines are a Sisyphean nightmare of people literally body to body, jostling and bumping as they shuffle ahead so that they can approach the first of several stations where they are required to present a government-issued I.D.
Howzat gonna work? I am wearing my cloth mask with a HEPA filter insert ( which is my NewNorm™ ), and I am not taking it off to breathe in the collective aerosollic spew of 300 people who are standing all around me.
Sir, remove your mask.
I’d rather not. It’s not safe.
Sir, remove your mask.
I’d like to leave it on.
Sir, you’re under arrest for daring to defy a direct order.
Welcome to the TSA. Anyone who thinks for one moment that they are going to be allowed to practice safe distancing and proper PPM protocols inside of an airport OR an airplane have another thing coming their way.
It’s called COVID. And being in an airport is a dandy way to die.
Back to cruises. Having staff serve patrons their food from steam tables certainly could help because vinyl sheeting can be installed which keeps service personnel freer than they might be from inhaling aerosol spew. Food lines aren’t my biggest concern, however. The intensely close quarters of EVERY SINGLE interior area of most cruise ships coupled with modest but not very aggressive air movers creates the perfect environment for many people to become infected from the exhalations of one or two.
Think that’s zany and paranoid bullshit? Look at the US Navy and the problems it is having.
All of this said, most people are really Sheeple. They’ll rapidly want to return to their previous norms because they cannot handle a sea change. They’ll go on cruises.
And bring it home with them. And perpetuate the cycles of waves of dead bodies.
I would love to consider that cruise, but we don’t have the money right now [which one is it?]
And I agree about cruises - we show up, unpack and are good until we pack and leave at the end. We prefer a balcony cabin - mrAru loves going ashore and exploring and I enjoy sitting on the balcony people watching. We like the food - we pop for one specialty meal [for our anniversary] and do the buffet and the regular dining room [breakfast buffets and lunch buffets, more formal dinner suits us] and we prefer to plan off boat stuff [parasailing has been a favorite, as was swimming with the mantas]
I know there is a lot of issue over the roaming polluting going on, but can one say that any form of vacation until you go anally econazi is pollutionfree? Even staying at home engenders a certain amount of pollution.
A couple of interesting typos there. 
I’m not sure any of those were typos !!
God I hope so. Got a cruise scheduled for next year (planned before all this started).
I’m not really sure how any of this is cruise-specific - I mean, no matter where I go on vacation I’m going to encounter the same situations. I haven’t found that restaurant/poolside/show/casino seating is any closer on a cruise ship than anywhere else I might go on vacation but for some reason, I only see “sheeple” type comments regarding cruises (not just this one and not just here) and not regarding vacations at land-based resorts or trips to Disney World. And I really don’t understand the difference.
It’s not a matter of “sheeple” but economics. For instance, commercial airliners require that people are very close to strangers while boarding, flying and disembarking. Should that change to allow for social distancing? Can it change? Even the first class seats have you less than six feet from a stranger. Airplane flights are going to be vastly more expensive if we have to be six feet from each other.
I don’t think people are “sheeple” for wanting to do fun things.
I could see cruises having mandatory virus testing required before being allowed to board. That won’t catch everyone, but it should help reduce the chances of getting infected while on the cruise. Something like that will help restore people’s trust and confidence that they will be safe and they’ll be more likely to consider cruising.
Unless you’re Marilyn Hartman.
The general consensus here seems to be that the pre-9/11 security rules were the case forever. They weren’t. It seems not many here ever flew before the hijacking crisis.
Readily agreed.
A blanket response to those recent posts re: my post.
Not everyone goes on vacation to Disney World. Not everyone feels compelled to get onto an airplane in order to be on a vacation. In fact, a very recent study proves that 73 % of all Americans would rather drive than fly to a vacation destination.
Not everyone wants to pay many thousands of dollars to be confined into a fairly small space for a part of their day/ night. From this article from 2020 on CruiseCritic,
Horrific. Still different strokes for different folks. Why did I use a perjorative like “sheeple” ? Because there are OTHER ways to use vacation time.
Forget COVID-19. And of course to be fair ignore the stats for 2020 in this mighty handy set of data from the US Centers For Disease Control & Prevention. ( Unless you see the CDC as a vast and irresponsible part of the Deep State Left Wing UnAmerican Conspiracy, in which case cruising is the very least of your issuse ).
The stats in pre-COVID-19 years ( say, the last 10 years of data ) show how seriously dangerous it is to be on a cruise ship.
Just saying.
I looked at your site. Those stats are scary.
I wonder how a cruise would compare to a land resort like Club Med or Sandals?
I don’t get that sense at all. I first flew in 1972, so I’m pretty aware of what security looked like starting from then. My only point was that TWA 800 was a really big turning point in airport security (and well overdue).