The post-coronavirus cruise? Not ready to sail

The post-coronavirus cruise? Not ready to sail
Frances Robles/The New York Times | Jul 01, 2020

W. Bradford Gary spent 10 days trapped inside a cruise ship cabin off the coast of Brazil in March while health authorities in several countries scrambled to figure out what to do with a vessel full of older people who had potentially been exposed to the coronavirus.

But when faced with the question of whether he’d ever cruise again, he didn’t hesitate.

“We are very anxious to get back on board,” he said, and he thinks he’s not alone: “There are people like us who want to do this.”

Gary, 70, a retired corporate executive who lives in Palm Beach, Florida, imagines the cruise ship of the near future equipped with special disinfecting ultraviolet lights and air flow contraptions commonly used in sterile laboratories. He envisions larger cabins, fewer passengers and a lot more outdoor spaces. “We want to know everything is safe,” he said.

That is a big order.

With more than 20 million passengers a year, the $45 billion global cruise industry has a particularly vexing challenge: Its most loyal customers, older people, also happen to be the key demographic at risk for the new illness that has swept the planet, killing more than 500,000 people. Cruises also have the very things that help the coronavirus spread: large gatherings, confined spaces and workers who live in tight shared quarters.

More than three months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a no-sail order for all U.S. cruises, interviews with health officials, loyal passengers, industry experts, cruise executives and maritime lawyers made clear that restarting operations would require rethinking cruising itself — from the number of passengers onboard to how they are fed, housed and entertained — and that the government and the cruise lines are not close to figuring it out.

The Cruise Lines International Association, the cruise industry’s trade group, said on June 19 that it was voluntarily extending the no-sail period from U.S. ports to Sept. 15. Earlier, Carnival Corp., the world’s biggest cruise company, had suggested that it could start sailings by Aug. 1.

According to Martin Cetron, the CDC’s director of the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, cruise ships offer fertile ground for the “seeding, amplification and dissemination” of COVID-19, worsened by the fact that crew members often transfer from one ship to another, taking diseases with them.

Breaking that chain of infection is key.

But as restaurants, casinos, movie theaters and theme parks are poised to reopen, with plans in place to prevent the spread of the highly infectious virus, the cruise industry has not publicly laid out its strategy.

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