Ogilthorpe

Well done! Hope your alternative cruise is a huge success. 😁

that's like the Hail Mary of last-second cruise rebookings.  good work! 

We just landed in Miami 2 hours ago after 12 hours of travel through snowstorms from Vancouver to find our Symphony sailing tomorrow is cancelled. Literally got the notification at the second wheels touched down. Obviously disappointed but we knew things are crazy and anything was possible. First reaction was let’s see if we can get on another Royal cruise sailing in the next day or two. Unfortunately Royal has all sailings through January frozen for new booking and no one at customer service was any help.
Ever the optimist, my wife got on the phone with Norwegian and long story short, we are boarding on Norwegian Joy in 17 hours. What a wild ride!! 🤯

Unfortunately, this means nothing as the cruise lines (Royal, at any rate) has already said that they will comply with the CSO even if becomes voluntary.  The CDC made it very clear that there would be OTHER ways that they [CDC] would make life difficult for the cruise lines if they don't.  I don't see anything changing soon....voluntary or mandatory. 

I think it’s better if we all stop clicking and reading these stupid news articles.  Stop giving these news outlets clicks.  Push these stupid news articles ti the bottom of news feeds.  

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2021/12/31/thousands-reject-cdc-advice-board-cruise-ships-for-vacations-amid-rise-in-covid-cases/
BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. – Cruising into the new year, thousands of passengers are rejecting the CDC’s advice not to sail as COVID-19 cases reach record numbers. The CDC issued this guidance despite every passenger 12 and older being required to be vaccinated.
“We don’t like to see even one case, but our experience is a fraction of the comparable statistics of virtually any other comparable location or industry,” Royal Caribbean Chairman Richard Fain wrote in a statement Thursday.
Royal Caribbean said since restarting in the summer, 1,700 of its 1.1 million guests have tested positive with 41 of those passengers going to the hospital and none of those 41 with the new variant.

Alternate title: Thousands do exactly as millions do every day on airplanes and travel, albeit with better protocols

41 out of 1.1 million going to the hospital.
 
I wonder what the pre-covid hospitalization for any cause rate was. Probably not much different than that.

To add my 2 cents to your well written view, IMO all of this comes down to money and when that happens following actual science, common sense and true risk assessment goes out the window, hence demonizing the cruise industry and losing many peoples faith in the CDC's latest proclamation 

You are absolutely right.  The airlines have been far more aggressive than the cruise industry in fighting the CDC from the very beginning of this pandemic. I said this when I first joined this blog site in 2020 COVID did not arrive in the US via cruise ship it arrive via airplanes. And I get the irony I work in the airline industry but I'm fighting for the cruise industry because I firmly believe the cruise industry has been scapegoated, unfairly targeted, shut down, dragged through the mud, held to a higher standard just to resume operations, not given a dime in bailout money (I could go on for days) all while the airline industry has positioned themselves as necessity to keep the economic engine of America running and therefore should not be subjected to any CDC oversight. What a ******* joke!!!
Although Fauci continue to throw around the idea of a vaccine mandate in order to travel domestically within this country I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say it will never happened in this country because there isn't a single airline in favor of it.  The airlines in this country want the public to believe they all compete against each other, they don't like one another but that is an illusion.  The truth is this nations airlines have a powerful lobbing machine in Washington D.C. perhaps not as powerful as the NRA but close to it.  And that machine has been working overtime since the beginning of this pandemic to keep CDC and Fauci at bay.  The unfortunate truth is cruise lines pale in comparison when it comes to the power the nations airlines wield.  And that is just the nations airlines lets not even talk about the hotel industry.  My husband and I went again to Las Vegas in mid December stayed at the Venetian yet the CDC wants me to believe I'm SAFER at the Venetian in Las Vegas than on a cruise ship with vaccine mandates, negative COVID test 2 days before boarding, 60% capacity, social distancing at all venues, and more. 
Oh I can't stop laughing at this bull(fill in the blank).

There won't be a vaccine mandate on airlines. Airlines hate the idea and they're way too powerful.

I'm hearing rumblings of a vaccine mandate coming to the airlines soon....but the airlines have a much more aggressive (and effective) lobby than the cruise lines which is why the airlines have been spared up until now.

I hate to come off as a crazy conspiracy theorist but what is that saying by politicians?  Never let a good crisis goto waste.
That said IMHO I think the bias toward the cruise ship industry is the negative view and overstated negative impact cruise ships have on the environment.  So its a great industry for certain politicians to target and hate. 
All of us here know the cruise ships tend to be cleaner and better sanitized than any land based resort and that was pre-covid, can only imagine protocols have improved beyond pre covid days.  Most of the ignorant and negative commentary comes from people who have likely never cruised.  But what do I know.  Rant over. 

I don't think the CDC is looking at shutting down the cruise industry again.  Even if Fauci and Walensky wanted to shut down the cruise industry I think the White House would stop them from doing it from behind the scenes because 2022 is an election year. The Biden Administration is doing everything they can to convince school districts across the country to remain open. They are even going as far as saying children are safer in school than they are at home which is funny because I remember the Trump Administration saying the same thing but that a discussion for another day.  
What I think the CDC is trying to do is convince either the public or the cruise lines themselves to either cancel their cruise (public) or voluntarily shut down (cruise lines).  Reading all of the stories over the past 2 weeks or so it does appear as though customers onboard experience is suffering with ports refusing to allow ships to dock and even onboard with shows and venues having to be closed do to crew members testing positive. I still believe the CDC's singling out of cruise lines out of all other industries that make up the travel industry is 100% wrong because cruise lines have the highest and most stringent level of safety protocols in place and again in the grand scheme of things positive cases on cruise ships are much lower than they are on land and most of the people who test positive on a cruise are either asymptomatic or have very mild symptoms  not requiring hospitalization. 
For people who have cruises book in January at this point in time you know what you're getting yourself into.  You know there is the possibility your ship may be turned away from one or more ports of call.  You know the onboard experience my be diminished slightly if the ship has to cancel shows and close venues do to positive cases amongst the crew. Anyone who decides to go on a cruise in January has a tough decision to make do you go on the cruise and take the chance of not having the experience you are looking for or do you cancel your cruise and rebook at a later date.  Personally if I had a cruise scheduled in January I think I would cancel and rebook a cruise at a later date. Not because I'm afraid of COVID or put much faith in the daily case count, I would cancel because the risk of disruption to my vacation is too high for me to ignore. For me cruising is about the experience and if the cruise ship can't provide the experience that I'm expecting (through no fault of their own) then I would just reschedule my cruise.

The CDC is a complete joke.  

One thing i cannot understand is why there is the need for all of these new measures when the same scientists who came across as the grim reaper for the past 18 months are saying this new variant is not as dangerous as Delta! Its just easier to catch and is like the common cold for those who are vaccinated! 
Yet in the UK we have brand new measures introduced when most of the country is vaccinated when lesser measures were rolled out before vaccine.. 
Oh wait!! I think i get it 😉

If the industry does shut down it will be cruise lines making that call. 
The Florida lawsuit resulted in the ruling that the CDC does not have the direct legal authority to shutdown the industry.  That resulted in the cruise lines voluntarily playing nice with the CDC.  
The CDC has done today what it has also done with air travel throughout the pandemic.  Today they issued "recommendations" against travel.  The CDC knows it has no authority to issue a shutdown.
The wild card are the ports of call.  
With no ports to visit the cruise lines will have little recourse.  
The Bahamas potentially closing private destinations within the Bahamas is a pretty significant factor.

Personally I feel that it's very unlikely. The people cruising right now had bad timing. Things hit so fast that they didn't have time to evaluate their options.  I am cruising in 3 weeks and if we have no shows or stops it won't bother me or deter me at all from going. My point is that I know this beforehand and I can cancel if I choose. The current cruisers were not in that position and disappointment is inevitable for many of them.

With all that is happening, could cruising be put on pause again?  It's not just the COVID numbers.  This recent surge is impacting the ships' ability to provide satisfactory service to their guests - cancelled port stops, shows, and on-board activities. I'm not trying to be a fear monger here.  I've been on six cruises post-COVID and all has gone well.  But to quote Han Solo, "I have a bad feeling about this!"

I don't understand the need for these PCR tests prior to sailing.  The results are only truly valid at the time you took the test.  Once you go out into the public, you could get exposed.  

RCL (and the cruise lines more generally) boxed themselves in by claiming the HSP's recommendations were what allowed them to control COVID (ha) and sail safely. It was pure hubris to suggest cause-effect in the first place, and it put the cruise lines in this weak position, where now they have to keep running in the proverbial wheel even though it's becoming clearer and clearer it has no real effect on anything.
How many ships are under investigation by the CDC right now? 70+? 

I don't recall the HSP ever made a claim to control COVID.
They claim to make sailing safer.  Not 100% safe without any risk, simply safe enough to allow cruising to occur.  They never claimed there would be zero cases.
Indeed the positivity rate is dramatically lower on ships compared to land, Florida in particular where most ships are boarding right now.  
It stands to reason with Florida nearing the highest peak of anytime during the pandemic, that ships would also realize a higher number of cases.  That is completely logical since the cases are being brought on board from land.  The HSP never said that ships would be capable of killing any virus carried onto a ship. The protocols are designed to detect, isolate and diminish but not eliminate spread.
It stands to reason with more cases being brought on board, there will be more cases on board.  Duh!

The rest aside, here is the root of the logical fallacy: there is no "safe enough". Perhaps you'll agree when the 100th ship sets under investigation by the CDC. You can argue for incrementalism, but then you end up here, in a place where we try to justify to each other with a straight face the value of wearing cloth masks in the face of overwhelming evidence suggesting their ineffectiveness or not being able to touch ketchup bottles. And now, since everything in the world we could possibly think of short of shutting down the industry again didn't actually work and at a first real world test has proven the futility of the exercise, we're stuck.

Please remove the 2/27/22 and 3/6/22 Anthem. Heads up to all: there is now a Star Class Suite available for 2/27  😉