JeffB

Hmmmm...... good guestimating. It peaked my interests so, I found what I needed at the web site I linked to below. I can interact with this graph displayed below at the link and can look at the daily case count. The 7d moving average as of 03/02 was 5 new cases/d so, after 20d, you'd hit that 100 case threshold. I'm good with that. Fair enough. But, the problem with that is, why didn't Curacao get a Level 4 designation from August through early December? It looks like that PH authorities there did a swell job of controlling the virus and what do they get for that from the US? A slap in th

Welp, not me, I'll let 'er rip ........ Twangster's thought is spot on. The problem is that Congress is tied up with getting some important stuff done so, introcuding a bill like that would probably be a non-starter. Still...... An EO might work but me thinks restarting cruising is not high on Joe Biden's list of things to do despite it being a perfectly reasonable and highly effective way to stimulate the economy at no cost, as Twangster points out, to the Feds...... and ye[, it would be politically dangerous for him to swim upstream on this with an EO. Or, maybe he could send a per

I think there is something to that first part. Maybe less so, the second. If I had the time and interest to dig into the data I talked about up thread so I could verify the how's and wherefores that the CDC put Curacao in the level 4 part of the grid, I'd do it. This entire COVID pandemic has gotten so political that it would not surprise me at all that data was fudged or interpreted differently to support messaging from the US Government that, wait a minute, it's not safe for American's to travel yet even though vaccines are becoming widely available and SARS-2 infection risks and seriou

I just looked at Curacao's public health web site. On March 2nd, the government conducted 278 tests and found 5 positives. That's a one day positivity rate of 1.79% (recall below 5% the virus is considered controlled/not circulating. The site I had access to did not have total tests per day or per month and you need to know that and the total population of Curacao (156,000) to fit Curacao into the grid that determines what level CDC assigns them found here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/how-level-is-determined.html Curacao, like most Caribbean destinations, has stric

"EU Announces Plan for Vaccine Passports." It's coming. Cross boarder EU travel is going to be available at some point when objections to the discriminatory nature of these things either get sensibly over-come or simply rolled over despite those objections. It's not clear in the article how US citizens who have been vaccinated will be treated. Looks like for now, anyway, it's EU passport holders who will be getting the green light. https://www.thedailybeast.com/europes-covid-passports-coming-to-an-airport-near-you-in-march

Correct on several counts ...... if you are booked in May or beyond, you're absolutely right, you have to pay attention. I agree that there's going to be a ship by ship, port by port restart. I believe the Haifa announcement this morning presages what is to come out of global sailings to include from US ports. RCL wants to get back to it and it is going to do everything it can to do that given what they are seeing from the CDC. I think someone posted somewhere on this forum his/her concern that European (or Mediterranean) ports might replace US ports if those became available before US po

What can we take from RCL's announcement that Odyssey will sail from Haifa on May 21st as Matt just posted on the front page? Well, if ports in FL and TX can lead the way in getting their COVID numbers right, we could see those ports getting sequentially greenlighted by the CDC. This thinking based on the experience in Israel may not translate to the US but I could see the CDC looking regionally and locally with lifting sailing restrictions instead of lifting the restrictions entirely. Besides that? Getting on an RCL cruise ship that's debarking from just about anywhere is going to

I don't disagree with this, after all, influenza has been absent this flu season mostly because of mitigation measures such as sanitizing surfaces. Both H1N1-influenza and norovirus are both known to be transmitted by fomites - the epidemiologic term for fingers > touch a contaminated surface > touch mucous membranes (mouth, nose eyes) > develop disease symptoms (fever, body aches, vomiting, diarrhea). My point was that it is now within the body of SARS-2 scientific knowledge that SARS-2 is not transmitted via fomites. Public health officials have advanced the notion that hand wa

Why is the Points Guy wrong about calling the number one thing to watch to signal a restart of cruising is new case numbers. Well. he's right in one sense since too many simply don't understand the science and the facts. But Public Health Officials deciding on what metrics should guide easing of mitigation measures should look at R(0) or the number of people one infected person then infects others. When that number is <1.0, the virus is receding, circulating and increasing when it's > 1.0. This is a graphic depiction of R(0) by state followed by a listing of each state's R(0). If I count

Obviously good news on the vaccine front today. After what seems like the 15th approval in a long list of news of, "it's approved", the J&J vaccine will begin distribution from manufacturing sites tomorrow. It's a one shot vaccine with trials underway to determine if two shots of it are better. Trials are also underway for teens. It's a "cold virus analog" carrying the SARS-2 spike protein that stimulates a protective immune system response. This, unlike the mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer, is a prototypical vaccine similar to AZ's and both the Russian and Chinese

Not sure if this is tongue in cheek or a serious question. I'm going with the later ....... This stuff is interesting tm me, may not be to others but I post it here mainly because there is so much misinformation about the SARS-2 variants, what they actually are, whether vaccines will be compromised by their appearance or whether or not they evade detection and produce more serious symptoms. The authors of the article where this chart appeared, along with being frankly honest about the risks a handful of variants present to controlling the virus, is that a mutation process known as "conver

What I just said ..... stop worrying about extremely unlikely COVID risks. This is a Bloomberg opinion piece that's paywalled but is free content here: https://tylerpaper.com/ap/commentary...88d89ab63.html Props to Matt's mention of the July 2020 study that showed cruise ships were pretty safe places to be. That study got absolutely ignored in the rush to hammer and scapegoat the cruise industry. So wrong!

Well, today's messaging from Fauci and Walensky is anything but encouraging or words that might lead to local officials easing restrictions or the CDC greenlighting cruising. In fact, quite the opposite and, IMO, intended. According to these now public faces of the Biden administration's COVID experts, the rate of decline in new infections is slowing so, don't break out the Champaign just yet ..... or worse, don't start relaxing mitigation measures or letting the cruise industry get back to producing billions in global economic activity.Here's the basis of that. Epidemiologist think that the

....... an additional comment as my initial post took an over 65 view of matters. It's important to understand that EVERYONE benefits from a vaccination priority system that vaccinates the 65 and up US population. The cohort from 65 and up has produced 77% of COVID related serious illness and deaths. That's not to say that there haven't been under 65s who have suffered. There have been, and not just a few. But to simultaneously reduce SARS-2 disease burden and control the virus (R0 < 1 on a regional or by state basis or, % positivity < 5% by county) requires initially vaccinating the ove

Link? Love to hear people's takes, positive and negative.