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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) by Booga1 on Thursday April 08 2021, @03:36PM
People willfully ignore their exposure risks and obviously can't determine their exposure levels until it's too late. As it turns out, some people will not actually avoid the plague.
Study after study has shown that people are atrocious at assessing risk. We've just proven that with the aforementioned surge from Thanksgiving and Christmas. You place too much faith in people's judgement. Perhaps you live in place with a smarter population, but around here we're seeing a 30-50% rise in cases over the last two weeks. We're possibly going to have to go backward a step or two in our reopening phases. People feel safer now that the vaccines are getting distributed, but around here they're acting dumber. They're exhausted and they've let their guard down too early.
This is what will happen with the cruise lines: They will make mistakes. They will not follow procedures. They will have outbreaks, I guarantee it. That's why they don't want to do the testing and reporting. No tests, no cases, no bad publicity. Money first, screw the safety of the passengers and crew. There's always more to replace them.