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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: 2, Touché) by Barenflimski on Thursday April 08 2021, @01:43PM (2 children)
Yes, fucking really. Over 100 Million are vaccinated or have had their first shot. Out of that 331 million, only about 250 million are eligible for the vaccine. About 50 million don't want the vaccine. That leaves you with 200 million that will get it. Half of the people that are eligible and want the vaccine are vaccinated.
You going to try to save the people that don't want the vaccine too? Or you trying to save the kids that survive this with zero issues sans a few edge cases?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday April 08 2021, @04:18PM (1 child)
Misrepresenting reality undermines your own argument. Which is a silly thing to do when you actually have a strong argument to begin with.
"Half the people who are eligible and want it" is a very different concept than "half the people". Especially when a large portion have only gotten the first dose. Well under 1/3rd of the population are currently fully vaccinated, and a whole lot of those who aren't eligible are still at risk, especially of spreading it - we just haven't yet confirmed whether these new kinds of vaccines are actually safer for kids than getting the disease. Especially since kids are at much reduced (though hardly zero) risk from the disease.
Now, I'm leaning hard toward opening most things up once everyone who wants the vaccine has gotten their second dose, simply because it's not looking like we can realistically eliminate this enemy. Not without setting some really dangerous precedent for what the government can require us to do with our bodies.
But, I'd still seriously consider endorsing mandatory vaccinations for some particularly high-risk voluntary activities, like airline travel or cruise ships. Simply because the faster this thing spreads, the sooner we're likely to get a new seriously dangerous variant that the vaccines don't work against. And we could really use at least a couple years of recovery before that happens.
If we do completely lift all restrictions, we need to actually be prepared for death and hospitalization rates to surge dramatically, and possibly seriously consider just letting unvaccinated people die from COVID if those beds are needed for patients with involuntary problems. 31M Americans have caught COVID so far - if we just open things up, we need to expect those 50M unvaccinated will be joining them within a few months, maybe sooner, along with everyone for whom the vaccine was ineffective or too dangerous to be an option.
Which means we should expect an additional 900,000 deaths within a few months (50M *1.8%death rate)- a roughly 50% increase in the average annual death rate, crammed into maybe 4 months? So call it an average of 2.5x the normal number of bodies needing to be disposed of every week, probably considerably higher at the peak. Lots of places were already having trouble handling the backlog from the relatively small surges seen so far. And that's assuming everyone who needs hospitalization gets it.
The hospitalization though will be real problem. 14% of COVID cases, 7M out of our 50, will require hospitalization for an average of 22.4 days, that's 157M patient days in 4 months, or about 1.3M patient-days every day. So *averaging* about 10x the worst daily COVID peak so far. COVID alone would average almost 3x the average pre-COVID hospitalization rate of around 450K patient-days per day. And hospitals aren't built with a lot of excess capacity - that'd just be wasted money cutting into profits. So we could easily see COVID deaths increase many-fold due to lack of medical care. Meaning millions of preventable deaths.
That doesn't necessarily mean we shouldn't do it - but we need to plan for the reality. Plan on mass graves, traveling crematoriums, or other temporary measures to handle the massive increase in body disposal - get the plans in motion now, before we lift the restrictions. And if you need COVID hospitalization during the surge, expect to be turned away with a wish of good luck and maybe a CPAP machine if you're lucky, unless the triage analysis determines you to be in the maybe 10 or 20% of cases where hospitalization will do the most good on a per-day basis.
By all means, let's open up - but lets do it with our eyes open.
Alternately, now that we have a solution for those almost everyone who wants it - we could focus on actually flattening the curve. Adjust restrictions on a daily basis as we strive to infect as many people per day as possible without overloading the hospitals. That gets us through this as quickly as possible without dramatically increasing the final death toll.
Should we do that though? Should we all continue to suffer for the good of those who *choose* not to protect themselves? I'm inclined to say no - lets start digging the mass graves and get this over with. Maybe we'll get lucky, and the number of vaccinated will slow the spread enough that the hospitals don't get overloaded. If you're among the vulnerable who couldn't get vaccinated... hunker down hard for a few months and try to ride it out. Get your vaccinated friends or family to do all your shopping for you, and maintain social distancing even from them since the vaccine doesn't necessarily protect them from being contagious. Maybe stock up on a bunch of dried beans, etc. to help you ride through the worst of the surge with no outside contact.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Friday April 09 2021, @08:25PM
I'm not sure I am wrong. It actually looks like more than half of folks that want the vaccine have already had it.
America may be close to hitting a vaccine wall - https://www.axios.com/america-coronavirus-vaccines-republicans-rural-states-34755cbf-384e-4539-bb45-68a775581f6f.html [axios.com]
Otherwise I appreciate your points.