columbus_cruiser

I'm not sure I agree with this.  Vaccines are great but not 100%.  If I'm crew and told to go sanitize a room for a guest that has tested positive I'm putting on a bio suit.

This is why the CDC wanted test cruises.  To make sure crew were following process and procedures.  
Crew are human, they are going to make mistakes.   In the end the process worked. 

IMO she should have insisted on having her seapass card punched as she knew she was unvaccinated, and not taken the purple bracelet. But no, she was wanting to try and get away with being a "vaccinated" passenger when she knew she was not. 
And yes, a free private jet ride home? Great way to get home. 

So in summary... unvaccinated person tries to pretend they are vaccinated.  What could go wrong?

She tested positive.  End of story. 
The mix up that resulted in her getting a bracelet did not cause her to become infected.   
She knows her vaccination status.  She chose to play like she was vaccinated using the bracelet to go into areas she knows she didn't belong.  The signs don't say "purple bracelets only", the signs read "Vaccinated Guest Area".  She knew she was breaking the rules.

Got a free ride home in a private jet.  Hard to complain about that.
Mixups are going to happen.  No system will ever be perfect.   
She needs to take accountability for her actions rather than trying to cast shade on the cruise industry.

They certainly aren't going to be getting any sympathy after they accepted the bracelets knowing they didn't deserve them.

I am genuinely interested in helping the cruise lines succeed.  Even to the point I would wear a mask on a test cruise. 
It's only 2 days (most of them in FL anyways) and it's not a cruise I'm paying for.  I don't want to wear a mask on a cruise vacation I'm paying for that is 5 or more days, I've already posted to that effect.  For a short test cruise that helps the industry?  I'll gladly mask up and do my part.   
There is also a part of me that believes the CDC introduced test cruises to create a roadblock that cruise lines would have a hard time overcoming.  It would be incredibly satisfying knowing I helped the cruise lines get past the CDC malarkey.  

With all due respect I don't see it that way (and I am not a lawyer).  Also there are two sides (some people tell me 3) to every story.  Here's my take:
The First Amendment prevents governments from limiting speech.   NCL claims that its desire to request evidence of vaccination constitutes speech and Florida's law prevents them from doing that. The 14th Amendment basically says states (e.g. Florida) cannot pass laws that are in conflict with federal laws Finally, I don't recall learning constitutional law in the 3rd grade (in fact, I had to just look up the 14th Amendment)
So, I don't think this is so cut & dry and will be interesting to see how this turns out.  IMHO, the big question is whether or not businesses requesting vaccination status constitutes "free speech". 

Since the Supreme Court ruled over 100 years ago that state governments could require vaccination for reasons of public health.  It would logically apply that a private company could require them to safely conduct their business.  The fact that recently the Hospital in Houston reinforced this by winning their lawsuit to require nurses to be vaccinated in order to be employed, is a good indicator that NCL will prevail over Florida.  The sooner the better.

I have no issue with any Royal ship.  Even those that recently left the fleet were good enough for me.  However it really depends what you are seeking.
I don't need zip lines and bumper cars to have a great cruise.  I can have a great cruise with just the basic or core essentials - pool, buffet, hot tub, casino, theater, salt air, wind on my nearly hairless head.   Some people are looking for the latest whiz bang and there is nothing wrong with that, that's what they seek.  
Just this week I booked the now oldest ships in the fleet because there are some stellar itineraries that the newer ships just don't do.   If you seek more diverse itineraries then those older ships are perfect.  
Put me on a ship, any ship, and I'll have a great cruise.
So it all depends on what you are seeking and what your expectations are.

If there are 2 of you eating at Izumi, I guarantee you’ll be stuffed even without using the entire $70 that you’ll be allowed to spend for 2 people.  That’s $35 per person just for the food ….. drinks are separate.  Even when I went on a cruise in 2019 without my spouse and with just my at the time 8yo son …… he ate off the kids menu for $10 and I wasted a lot of my food for $35 because I couldn’t eat it all 
 
 

The market is a bit wonky over the past few days; I think the overall market sentiment is what's dragging RCL. 

Central Park has been so popular. I hope it transcends classes

Unfortunately, false positives and negatives will happen. These are the risks anyone cruising right now needs to accept. 

Very nearly but didn't - because of the protocols that worked.  The failed quick test was followed up by a more reliable PCR test.  Those are the protocols.  

Jeff please continue giving us your expertise!
A quick word on research. As holding a post graduate degree from a major research university (I am not bragging, no really I not), although I am not a researcher, I was taught by a few profs that the first thing to look for in a research paper was who was paying for the research, then who are the researchers and do they have skin in the game or will they profit from said research other than being paid to do the work. One of the most upfront faces in this ongoing discussion in this country allegedly profits from one of the major drug company's that have produced one of the vaccines. 

On a whim? (1) we're talking about a public health crisis involving a pandemic that has caused the death of 1/2M people in the US. There are medical therapies that can be used to subdue it's impact that include vaccines. (2) There are laws that allow businesses to fulfil their moral and ethical responsibility to  create a save environment to do business.
Taken together I can argue we have a civic duty as Americans to follow the law and be ethically and morally responsible. YMMV, JMO, I am heavily biased as a medical professional toward vaccination ....... I am also stepping over the lines that Matt has established for discussions like this. I'll read but that's the last of my post on this thread on vaccinations, whether or not they work and whether or not those able ought to get them.  that's reared its head again and I'm guilty.

Its an unpopular position to articulate support for the CDC. Their public messaging hasn't been good. They have themselves to blame for that. However it is the politicians and the press that "politicize" their recommendations and public statements that come from the CDC.
I'm not a fan of Anthony Fauci either and the reasons for that go beyond his credentials as a virologist - those are solid. He is always very careful - hedging is the operative term - not to get pinned down. Listeners don't like that but he's a scientis and few things are certain in science, especially emerging science on SRAS2 and COVID. 
The CDC, in most circumstances that do not involve regulatory authority (I'll get to that), provide recommendations for PH matters. They don't direct anything and since the mask debacle in February 2020 and the Trump administration telling CDC folks to go sit in the back of the room and shut-up, CDC spokespersons have been very careful to make that clear.
The most recent clarifying statements wrt that involve the position they took on masking when their recommendations (no masks for vax'ed) differed from the WHO's recommendations (masks indoors regardless of vax status....... Walenski's response when asked about this (paraphrased) "we are recommending no masks for the vaccinated in the US but leave decisions in that regard to local PH authorities." I think the CDC is spot on regarding no mask wearing required for vaccinated people in the US. I'm pretty sure you would not disagree with that.
The CDC does, in fact, have regulatory authority over the cruise lines through the Vessel Sanitation Program (VSP). The authority I am most familiar with is what is granted under 42 U.S.C, Section 264. Regulations pertaining to preventing the interstate spread of communicable diseases are contained in 21 CFR parts 1240 and 1250 and 42 CFR part 70.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/42/71.1
When Merryday ruled in FL v. Bacerra, he did not say the CDC doesn't have regulatory authority. They do. What he said is that aspects of the CDC specifically directed at the cruise industry were, for all-intent-and-purpose, new laws that the CDC does not have the power to write.  Most of the legal arguments presented by FL's attorneys revolved around the limited time frame that free pratique can be denied via the VSP. That argument carried the day and the details of why it did, including pages of citing case law going back hundreds of years is in his written ruling. The link below describes the CDC's regulatory authority for the cruise line.
https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/vsp/default.htm
I can't agree with this generalized statement. There is some uncertainty about responses to vaccines v. natural immunity with certain T-Cell types. With others there is no uncertainty - for example, CD4 and CD8 T-Cells showed a marked decrease following infection with SARS2 that are not seen with vaccines. In fact, the T-Cell response with the mRNA vaccines is robust (confounding factors in several studies were not isolated. The article linked below pertains.
https://www.news-medical.net/health/What-are-T-Cells.aspx
WARNING: we can easily both get in over our heads in this area. 
What I try hard to do within this forum when I post about COVID is to eliminate my biases or admit them and not make generalized statements that may not be supported by the facts. Nevertheless, in social media platform like this is authoritative statements frequently become gospel when the statements conform with a particular readers biases and preconceived beliefs.  It's not easy to remove biases from posts. Admission of a bias and links to facts supporting a viewpoint are helpful. I really have a problem with sweeping generalizations intended to support a POV. 

The law only says they can’t REQUIRE you to show proof of vaccination to receive service ….. they’re getting around the law by saying NOBODY has to prove they’re vaccinated to take their cruise ……. BUT the law doesn’t say that they can’t say that EVERYBODY vaccinated or unvaccinated has to follow certain requirements unless they VOLUNTARILY decide on their own to show proof of vaccination …… it’s a big glaring loophole in the law, but it is there.
 

@smokeybanditI went back and looked at the study. The CDC is the sponsoring organization. It was the Greek Health Ministry among others that provided the data and did the analysis. They are credited in the study.
TBH, after going back and reading it, I'm not really clear on how many pax and crew were on board. If you look at Appendix 1. I'm lead to believe that there were 383 positive cases on board among all passenger and crew - the specific number not named. In the abstract, it says there were 383 crew members on a 2000 person capacity ship so ????. Admittedly the abstract leads you to believe there were 123 cases of COVID among 383 passengers and crew. Is it just coincidental that there were also 383 crew and the exact number - 383 - cases? I don't know.
Despite this confusion, the data demonstrated at R(0) of 2.6 on board a cruise ship with naïve hosts as pax and crew and limited (masks and hand hygiene) mitigation measures in place.  I'm more interested in this figure than I am the confusion over numbers of passengers and/or crew although I grant this is not unimportant. After re-reading the study, I didn't get that it was a 40 year old passenger ferry on a work charter. Admittedly, I assumed it was a cruise ship. I'll also defer to your view that nothing can be taken from the study although I disagree with that assessment.
There is ongoing debate on this forum and elsewhere about the degree of risk that sailing on a cruise ship presents to passengers and crews. There are many who say the risk is small such that it is no more risky than getting in your car and driving to work. I don't think the evidence supports that view but it is widespread. If you are among that group, I'm not going change your mind. The problem with debating it is that it is hard to define the system for the debate and deal with all the variables in an on-line forum.
From retrospective data we have available, I do think it is safe to assert that cruise ships can and probably do produce higher rates of SARS2 infection, among naïve hosts, over a defined time span than other congregate settings (by CDC definition). That is just because of the nature of living, eating and socializing aboard a cruise ship. Assessing the risk to one's health of that higher infection rate is much more complicated. I'll leave it at that. Here's the study:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/7/21-0398_article 
 

Not to mention a cruise like this where your objective is determine what the occurrence rate of COVID is among passengers and crew on a cruise ship without any mitigation measures v. SARS2 would be unethical. Yeah, it would be interesting with that ship as a control group so to speak but if you're actually going to set up a serious study, it goes through peer review among a panel that is part of the sponsoring scientific organization, e.g. the CDC, JAMA, Science and Nature, Lancet. 
Here's some useful data that we already have: I linked to a study, released just this month I believe in JAMA, in another thread that looked retrospectively at this using a cruise ship sailing out of Greece and Turkey in early March of 2020. Recall that the WHO had not yet declared a pandemic and most countries in February and March hadn't imposed any mitigation measures or if they had done so they were limited.
It had roughly 3000 passengers and crew. The estimated R(0) following the first detected and reported COVID case was north of 2.0 before the ship was quarantined in a Greek port and sick/asymptomatic infected passengers were debarked. This means infections on this studied ship grew at an exponential rate very quickly ...... doubled (X2), then X4, then X16 and so forth. If I remember the data over 30% of the pax and crew on that ship became infected within a matter of days from recorded case #1.
Infections were highest among crew that had higher rates of per-person face to face contact among each other at their bars, clubs and quarters than paying passengers. A cruise ship with zero mitigation measures and a passenger manifest of unvaccinated naïve hosts would be a SARS2/infectious disease nightmare. Even now. Infections are infections even though we are dealing with them much more effectively than we were 18 months ago. if anything, the virus has become more transmissible over time.  I have heard that there are on-going studies looking at large gatherings and trying to model a safe vaccination rate. Is it 50% of 1000 people, 80% of 2000? Hard to say but that's being looked at. My gut tells me the cruise lines have an idea of what vaccination rate produces and acceptable level of positive COVID rapid antigen tests over a range of numbers of pax on a ship's manifest. Variables are hard to control but one could come up with something to go on that is better than nothing.   
   

I’d like a clean sheet design too.  I do hope she has a Central Park kind of thing though. That’s just spectacular and I miss it on every non oasis class I go on. 

Carnival has better food. The newer ships with 7+ day sailing durations attract the same crowd as RC. The Carnival casino program is more organized then RCs players club. RC has a far superior suite program and the loft suite option just puts them in a separate league. Personally I wouldn’t hesitate to sail on a newer carnival ship and the experience is as good or in some cases better then any RC option. As others have said, the older ships on shorter sailings are filled with the drunk/party crowd and you cannot use this as a basis for comparison. 

I'm two or three cruises short of platinum on Carnival which is comparable to RCI Diamond in terms of points level and level of effort to achieve.  
Royal's loyalty program is significantly better at the Diamond level and above.  Below this level both loyalty programs don't do a whole lot.
I stopped cruising Carnival a few years ago not because I ever had a bad cruise with them but because I was left wanting something a little more.  
Before Carnival Breeze all ships had that hideous coral color cabin.  If you could be transported between ships you would have no idea you were on a different ship because the cabins all have that coral color and all cabins are nearly identical across the older fleet.  The spa cabins on the Breeze finally started introducing some better cabin decor.
Since the Breeze I feel like Carnival is cramming more and more people on their ships without making the ships equally larger.  Mardi Gras looks very interesting but the passenger count concerns me and when I researched it they have reduced cabin width for most cabins to get more people on the ship.  Crowding has been an increased concern on Carnival's more recent ships and I'll be watching closely when Mardi Gras first sails with guests to see just how bad it's become.  
As far as dining that is very personal so it's hard to declare a winner.  Each of us has our own tastes.  Mass market cruise food isn't going to win prizes on any cruise line.
On Royal's newer ships I find the entertainment is better than Carnival.  On older Royal ships entertainment is not a whole lot different compared to Carnival.  
Beer choices are better on Carnival. 
Guy's hamburgers are much better than the included hamburger options on Royal but I do feel like I am knocking on death's door with each bite of a Guy's burger. 
Internet is far superior on Royal over Carnival but Princess has Royal beat in the internet department.  Royal claims the fastest internet at sea but that claim comes from the era before Princess upgraded their fleet.  Royal doesn't upgrade ship internet, only the newer ships get better internet.  As Princess has upgraded their fleet over the past few years they crept past Royal for the fastest internet at sea despite Royal still using the "fastest" marketing claim from 5 years ago.  Carnival tries to blur the marketing by using the Princess fleet internet and applying it as "Carnival" internet being the best when in reality the Whale Tail fleet has poor internet period.  So both lines have some shady internet marketing in play but focusing on the Whale Tail Carnival brand versus Royal, Royal wins the internet performance battle while CCL's social media internet option is cheaper. 
At the end of the day what my opinions are don't matter.  Each of us has preferences and likes vs. dislikes.  All you can do it try it and see for yourself.  However as others have noted research the ships so you are comparing apples to apples or as close as you can to that analogy.   A new CCL ship is going to yield a better experience over the oldest RCI ship and vice versa.  
When I tried Royal I found it satisfied more of what I was seeking but at a slightly higher cost.  I feel like that cost gap has narrowed over time with CCL charging more for their newer ships now.  Mardi Gras pricing isn't very different than Odyssey pricing (both new ships) but you can always find one week on one or the other that's cheaper on either depending on cabin type and how many are in your party.  

Well that question is a sure way to get this thread locked.  ? 
I'll give my simple perspective... vaccines aren't as protective against the new variants/strains of COVID and the biggest threat is the Delta strain which is the cause of surges in the UK and is taking a foothold in the US.  So even vaccinated people are still "at risk" of catching COVID, abet a milder form and hopefully not bad enough to allow that person to spread the disease (research is still out on that).  On a cruise however you feel more "at risk" because if you catch COVID, you may have to cut the cruise short due to the protocols and I know I don't want that for me having waited so long to get a boat.