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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: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday April 08 2021, @02:11PM
Once everyone who wants to be vaccinated has had a chance to do so, there's a part of me that just says drop all the restrictions and let the unvaccinated contribute to the improvement of the species in finest Darwinian fashion. Preferably without the rest of us having to foot their medical bills.
Of course, there will be some few for who the vaccine is ineffective that will suffer as well. That's unfortunate, but once vaccinated the odds of developing serious problems really do appear to be less than for a mild flu.
The real problem is that the resulting voluntary pandemic won't just cause misery to a bunch of people who should have known better, it'll also provide a fertile breeding ground for new mutated variants that could be more dangerous and more contagious, that the vaccine will be ineffective against. Then we're right back at square one with something even worse than before.
Unfortunately, short of requiring mandatory vaccination for all (which brings up some really serious issues of bodily autonomy), I don't see that there's any way to avoid that outcome anyway. It's looking like between the anti-vaxxers and the ever-Trumpers (and other such groups in other nations), we're not going to get enough people vaccinated to achieve herd immunity, so this will just keep circulating and mutating in perpetuity. Just like most every other disease really, except that this one started out contagious, dangerous, and unstable enough to be worrisome.
So maybe we're just stuck letting nature run its course once we've done what we realistically can, getting protection to all who want it.
Still, I wouldn't be opposed to requiring proof-of-vaccination before entering such voluntary hot-spots as aircraft, cruise ships, etc. Just to slow down the rate at which it spreads so we're not hopefully not hit by several dangerous new variants simultaneously.