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Cruise industry salty over CDC plan to keep travelers safe from COVID at sea:
The cruise industry is rather salty about the latest federal guidance for safe pandemic sailing, calling it "burdensome" and "unworkable. "
The new guidance is an updated phase of the Framework for Conditional Sailing Order (CSO), released April 2 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While it does not mandate vaccinations for all staff and cruisegoers, it does recommend the shots and requires added layers of health measures to try giving any onboard COVID-19 outbreaks the heave-ho—which is exceedingly difficult to do on the tightly packed, highly social vessels.
Among several changes, the guidance requires cruise operators to increase how frequently they report the number of COVID-19 cases onboard, upping reporting from weekly to daily. It also requires cruise lines to implement new routine testing for crew members. Additionally, the guidance requires that cruise lines have agreements set up with port authorities and local health authorities to ensure that, in the event of an outbreak, there will be coordination and infrastructure necessary to safely quarantine, isolate, and treat passengers and crew on land.
Once those requirements are met, cruise operators can run mock cruises with volunteer passengers and, if all goes well, apply for a "Conditional Sailing Certificate."
In a statement released Monday, the prominent industry trade group Cruise Lines International Association released a statement calling the new guidance "unduly burdensome, largely unworkable."
The CLIA claims the health guidance "deprives US workers from participating in the economic recovery" and provides "no discernable path forward or timeframe for resumption" of cruises originating in the country. The group ended its statement by urging the Biden administration to "consider the ample evidence that supports lifting the CSO this month to allow for the planning of a controlled return to service this summer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @01:03PM (2 children)
Your argument about giving people information is specious. Information is out there but there is an equal volume of ignorant misinformation being spread.
Taking a cruise and getting COVID-19 does not affect just you. It affects everyone you come into contact with after that. Whether you believe it or not, this disease is deadly. Over 500,000 dead from it in the United States alone. If the cruise industry has value someone will invest to keep it going. If the industry did not prepare for rainy days that is their own fault.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Barenflimski on Thursday April 08 2021, @02:15PM (1 child)
This seems to be a fairly typical response. This type of response it mostly regurgitated from the talking heads you hear that speak from the "I know better than you" crowd.
This is true, but that doesn't mean that most of us don't understand how to get the right information. Just because there is misinformation out there is not an excuse to continue to lock people down.
This is just simply not true. If I get COVID, it affects no one but myself. If I get COVID, I wear a mask and stay away from other people while I'm contagious. Your assumptions are flawed. You're imagining that we get COVID, are all "super spreaders" and we infect as many people as possible. This is fear based nonsense, especially considering the vaccination penetration and the already infected/cured penetration. Tack on the next 2 months that it would take to get people on cruises and your entire argument goes up in smoke as anyone vulnerable will have had plenty of time to get fully vaccinated by then.
You may not like the cruise industry, but that gives you no right to shut them down. I have never been on a cruise. We aren't talking about a rainy day slush fund here. We are talking about over a year of "rainy days." Very few industries and very few businesses have that kind of capital.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @08:27PM
And just how often do you get tested for COVID? Since one can spread the disease without showing any symptoms it seems that frequent testing would be the only way to know if one is contagious or not.