Of course not everybody wants to go on a cruise or go to Disney World or needs to get on a plane to go on vacation. And of course there are other ways to use vacation time. But unless I’m going to spend a vacation sitting in my house ( which I’m doing quite enough of already) I’m going to be in contact with as many people as I would be on a cruise ship and sitting just as close to them at restaurants and so on.
I don’t think the CDC is part of a conspiracy at all - but I’m also not at all sure outbreaks on cruise ships are all that much more common that those at land-based resorts and hotels. What I do know is that I couldn’t find a single page listing all the hotel and resort outbreaks for the last 20+ years. I searched for “resort outbreaks” on the CDC website and got 692 results. Now I’m sure that’s not 692 outbreaks , but I’d bet there are at least 10-20 hotel/resort outbreaks per year.
doreen and Urbanredneck both raise very valid points.
I’ll go poking, and see what I can find !
Very few vacation spots are NOT crowded. Going to Mount Rushmore a few years ago was crowded. The Sturgis Bike Rally is crowded. Burning Man is crowded. State Fairs are crowded. I’ve never been but I’d guess the Smithsonian in DC, the Louvre in France, and the area around Buckingham palace are also crowded.
I hear the worse place for crowds is Venice Italy.
I’ll propose a technological fix for crowd reduction and safe distancing. Background: Before the county forced my neighbors to physically fence their yard to contain their vicious dogpack, the creeps tried a “wireless fence” with electro-shock collars. The dogs grew accustomed to those jolts, hence the required chain-link fencing, but maybe the collars would work better with higher voltages.
So, my proposal: Build locking electro-shock collars with proximity and motion detectors. Issue such collars to all cruise passengers and attendees at events. Approach within X meters of another collar and yours is activated. ZAP! Down on your knees, scofflaw! But how to screen masochists? Test pain thresholds maybe?
Also issue those at nude beach entrances. That’ll reduce inappropriate public contact!
For unconcerned folks, run quarantine cruises and resorts (erotic or not) ONLY for COVID positives, sequestered together the entire time. That’s fun to die for. 
Here is an interesting youtube video of how a teenager got quarantined on a cruise chip for 60 days. LINK
The video is very light but when you think about it it’s actually very scary to think you would be stuck in a tiny cruise ship cabin.
so I can’t be near my spouse or kids [well, if we had kids] on vacation. I think both mrAru and I would get pretty testy if we couldn’t get closer than 6 feet to one another … =)
Each collar bears an ID code. Program them with “exclusion codes” that won’t trigger the agony/ecstasy. You and your family are safe together. But if your wee ones run toward strangers, they’ll drop like flies. That’ll teach-em!
That’s an animated, fictional story. It provides no evidence of anything other than imagination. How is this useful or relevant?
ETA: From the person(s) who brought you the videos “There Is a Ghost in My School” and “I’ve Been Frozen for 15 Years|Animated Story about Time Traveling.”
Update:
What could go wrong if they try to run cruise ships again?
Saw that yesterday. Hurtigruten is a pretty high-end, pricey cruise outfit, with much smaller than average ships. They should be in a position to implement some pretty stringent protocols to avoid COVID-19 transmission.
If they are failing at it right out of the gate, there is absolutely no way that Carnival, or Norwegian, or any of the other large, mass-audience ships can do this safely. The cruise industry is in for a world of hurt. I think we’re going to see a lot of contraction in that industry, particularly the mega-ships.
They are starting to scrap ships. Seems like they cannot even give them away now. The three in the article are from around 1990 so perhaps a bit long in the tooth, but still seaworthy. I guess they did not offer the amenities people want these days (every room with a balcony, rock climbing walls, etc.).
Cruising may be enjoyable and a great way to see various places. I don’t think they are my style, but I have friends and family members who love them.
The industry has been greatly damaged by questionable hiring practices and perceived lack of concern for passenger health. A lot of them have not been permitted to dock in many countries. In vulnerable places like Venice, their merits are being debated.
But travel has been hit hard on general. I actually do think cruising will make a comeback, with some consolidation. My guess is it takes at least a couple years (I think memories of epidemics fade pretty quickly), requires giving big discounts initially and with a more restricted itinerary as some places limit or ban larger ships. But I’m just talking, I’ve never been on one and have no direct knowledge.
We’ve got 3 booked & paid for. They were supposed to start this fall, all pushed back until Oct. 2021. They are music themed cruises, with the band’s & artists as our fellow passengers, full charters. We’re just letting them hold our money, airline tickets were easy to cancel (put on hold actually) & even the travel insurance is transferred. We’re going & just plan either a vaccine when/If available or being aware.
If you can still basically function you aren’t going to be living in a nursing home . Perhaps constant cruises instead of living in an independent living retirement community, maybe.
Well, that quote from mid-April seems pretty optimistic, given how things have “progressed”…
There’s no guarantee that the virus rampant on your cruise ship will only be a norovirus.
I’m from a family who loves cruisin’. But even back in the Oughts, we just assumed that every third cruise, a bunch of people would get sick. And Great-Grams often didn’t go, due to respiratory problems (a lifetime of smoking). If she caught something, that might have been all she wrote.
We all knew the cruise ship was a floating Petri dish.
Every now and then I’ll catch an episode of “The Love Boat”, which was about in that timeframe. How did the ship in the show compare to ships at that time, and how does it compare to ships now? At the time, was it a really big and luxurious ship compared to typical cruise ships? Are there cruise ships now that are about the size of that ship?
The Love Boat ran from 1977-1987, and was actually instrumental in making pleasure cruising a thing. There weren’t a lot of ships afloat to compare it to. I’m guessing that ships of that era would probably carry 1,200 passengers or so. Princess launched the Grand Princess in 1998 as the largest cruise ship in the world, with 2,590 passengers.
Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas, launched in 2009, carries 5,400 passengers.
I remember surfing looking at vessels for sale about 15 or so years back and finding the original Love Boat - Pacific Princess [name removed and always transferred to the flagship of that line when they sold off the vessel] for sale to be broken. It was up for the docking fees/salvage - starting was a quarter of a million as I remember. It still had everything, engines, electronics, etc … I really really wanted to buy it, but bunkering for fuel alone would have been something over a hundred thousand bucks a top off … as I vaguely recall, it had 2 ‘owners suites’ aft with balconies, one level of regular staterooms with balconies [smaller, tiny balconies, tiny bathrooms] and one floor that was tiny non balcony cabins - frequently the ones seen in the show] and split with the crew quarters, the official stuff - bursars office, medical office, a tiny brig and one level that was the main dining room, the bar and the welcome atrium, and the open part of the deck with the pool and hot tub. If one wanted to try and make it a condo/commune situation, it would have served for at least 35 cabins [if I remember the numbers correct] worth of people [one or two per cabin] splitting the costs. If one owned the right location of deep river bank, one could even berth it for free if you put in your own shore facilities [power, water in, sewage out, ramp for supplies and people, cable/internet lines in, perhaps a shore phone line …]
Also found - Princess Caroline of Monaco’s royal yacht, overpriced at 35 million bucks, and Winston Churchills wartime yacht at a much more affordable 3.5 million bucks.
It seems that cruise ships have a useful life of around 30 years, so those three about to be scrapped are right at that mark. Newer ships are more fuel efficient and yes, they have more balconies, climbing walls, roller coasters, go-kart tracks, etc. They probably would have been scrapped now even without COVID-19.
The Carnival Fantasy is one of those three - it was the oldest ship under the Carnival name, and even though it was the biggest thing on the seas in 1990, it’s now only about half as large as today’s mega ships.
I dont know that they would have been scrapped by now - the Carnival Fantasy had some retrofitting done in early 2019 (according to Wikipedia) so it probably was planned to sail for a few more years. Even so, I would imagine a well-maintained (if outdated) ship could have been purchased by a smaller cruise line before sending it to the scrap heap. The pandemic means no one is buying ships and they are too costly to keep afloat while the company waits for passenger volume to return to pre-COVID levels.