A new cruise ship policy announced in March 2018 will require passengers with confirmed COVID-19 cases to disembark from the vessel. The less than one percent of travelers who contract COVID-19 while traveling are highly contagious, and airborne outbreaks can easily spread on cruise ships. Until recently, however, there was no way to track how many people had contracted the disease during a particular voyage or country visit due to lack of data availability.
The “cruise ship covid outbreak 2021” is a recent trend that has been happening on cruise ships. The islands turn the cruise ship away due to onboard COVID-19 cases.
Royal Caribbean said late Wednesday that 55 fully vaccinated guests and staff members on board the Odyssey of the Seas had tested positive for COVID-19, prompting the ship to be turned away from two of its planned Caribbean ports of call. The illnesses arose only a few days after the ship’s departure from Fort Lauderdale on a roundtrip eight-day Caribbean itinerary centered around the holidays on December 18.
“There were test results that came back positive for COVID-19 during normal weekly testing of our fully vaccinated crew members,” Royal Caribbean spokesman Lyan Sierra-Caro stated on Tuesday night. “Close connections were easily discovered, and they were all placed in quarantine promptly.”
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Odyssey of the Seas had previously visited CocoCay, Royal Caribbean’s private island resort in the Bahamas, according to CruiseMapper, but was refused admission to the following two locations on its itinerary: Curacao and Aruba.
According to CNN, Curacao’s health officials refused the Quantum Ultra class ship permission to land in Willemstad because the proportion of persons aboard infected with COVID-19 was too high, at over one percent.
According to the Curacao Chronicle, Dr. Izzy Gerstenbluth, the island’s national epidemiologist, stated Wednesday: “The day before yesterday, 18 crew members were positive, yesterday 36, and this morning 51.” Furthermore, since numerous crew members were not isolated, there is a significant likelihood that passengers were sick as well.”
According to Gerstenbluth, the country’s standards provide that no more than one percent of a ship’s aboard population may be infected before it can land. “With these numbers of diseases, that proportion has been surpassed, and we are therefore not pleased to welcome these individuals on the island,” he stated.
The Odyssey of the Seas is now traveling with 3,587 passengers and 1,599 staff members, with 95% of the passengers and crew members being completely vaccinated. All crew members and guests aged 12 and above must complete an authorized course of inoculations at least 14 days before to departure, according to Royal Caribbean standards. Members of the crew are also obliged to be tested at least once a week. Before boarding, unvaccinated minors under the age of 12 must provide a negative PCR test as well as a rapid-testing negative at the terminal.
Odyssey of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean ship (Photo via Lauren Bowman)
Because it’s not clear whether these breakthrough infections are linked to the highly contagious Omicron variant that’s on its way to becoming the world’s dominant COVID-19 strain, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is getting involved to investigate the dozens of cases aboard the cruise.
Aboard Thursday, CDC spokeswoman David Daigle informed USA Today that the CDC is “investigating the recent rise of COVID-19 cases found on Royal Caribbean International’s Odyssey of the Seas.” “All of the instances seem to be asymptomatic or minor. Furthermore, no COVID-19-related hospitalizations, medical evacuations, ventilator usage, or fatalities have occurred aboard this ship.”
Only a few days before Odyssey of the Seas’ onboard epidemic, Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas announced its own mid-cruise COVID-19 outbreak, with at least 48 individuals testing positive when the ship docked in Miami on December 18. It had also been sailing a round-trip Caribbean cruise from Florida with 6,091 guests and staff members on board, with 95 percent of them completely vaccinated once again.
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The “carnival cruise covid outbreak” is a recent outbreak of the highly contagious viral disease, COVID-19. The ship’s captain has decided to turn the ship away from an island that had reported a case.
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