JeffB

Section 2. Businesses in Florida are prohibited from requiring patrons or customers to provide any documentation certifying COVID-19 vaccination or post-transmission recovery to gain access to, entry upon, or service from the business. Section 3. All executive agencies under my direction shall work to ensure businesses comply with this order. Any provision of Florida Statutes is hereby suspended solely to the extent it restricts a Florida agency from requiring compliance with this order as a condition for a license, permit, or other state authorization necessary for conducting business in Florida. Section 4. All businesses must comply with this order to be eligible for grants or contracts funded through state revenue. I don't see that in the EO. If you have a business license in the state of FL, you can't require proof of vaccination to receive services that business is offering. The rejoinder in Section 3 says that businesses are not restricted from imposing their own health protocols as long as those aren't a requirement to show proof of a vaccination.

Thanks for that. I had not read the details of the EO from the new sources I scan. I didn't think Desantis could touch the cruise ships. However, I'm 100% behind vaccination passports and a requirement for them to enter a business establishment, sports event or concert. Generally, I'm opposed to the unlimited powers granted to governments by a declaration of a public health emergency. That needs to get thought through next time with decisions about extending or canceling the declaration left to a panel of both physical and mental health experts along with panel members that include economists and business people. But not vaccine passports. #1 it's an incentive to get vaccinated or obtain a valid doctor's excuse why you can't get vaccinated. You have to have a driver's license, right? Part of that is to make sure you know the rules of the road and operate a motor vehicle safely and held accountable when you fail to do that.

We've used Celebrity perks on RCL cruises and yes, the Diamond Lounge perk beats anything Celebrity offers. Celebrity turned Michael's Club into a suite guests only lounge. On Celebrity, you can now use your 3 drinks allotment at any bar on board with a limited bar menu that's OK, not fabulous. But, hey, it's free drinks. You also get 240 minutes of Internet. Whoopee. Both those perks have been diluted now with Celebrity's "Everything Included" approach. You get the Classic Beverage Package which is also OK, not great (better than the Captains Club perk cocktail menu). You can upgrade to the Premium package on a per day basis charge paid in advance (everything and anything) and it's usually discounted both pre-cruise and maybe the first day depending on ships load factor. If you upgrade, all adult parties in your cabin have to upgrade. Internet is unlimited at the lower speeds. You can upgrade if you want to stream video content. Booking a suite gets you a premium beverage package and the upgraded Internet thing. The laundry perk avoids washing undies and socks in the sink and for longer cruises, taking enough of those garments to last the entire cruise. We use it a lot. One thing we enjoyed on RCL with our Elite status from Celebrity is that drinks go from 5 - 8:30p on RCL, 5-7p on Celebrity. We dine late so that's real nice. Also enjoyed the Diamond Club and heavy hors d'oeuvres. There's bites on Celebrity if you go to the designated Captain's Club Lounge whihc may be at different locations on the ship. Thier OK but the spread in the Diamond Club is better. We're actually Elite Plus on Celebrity which means about zilch and I might get to Zentih if I booked the owner's sweet 5x per year for the next 10y, or alternatively, booked OV or Veranda cabins more than 20 cruises per year for the next 20 years ... heh. Hard to get to Zenith and every passenger I've met that got there was well into their 80s with 100 Celebrity cruises or more under their belts.

I get the complexity of the science that the CDC has to wade through in making recommendations. Politics is obviously playing a part in public policy statements like this. It's noteworthy that the CDC is at least 2w, maybe 4, behind the facts on the ground. Their claim that as new data is received, changes can be made rings hollow with me. What took you so long to catch up with what most people that follow this stuff know and that people in the know that have been vaccinated have been pretty much doing whatever they want, including flying on airplanes, since, oh, maybe mid January when lots of 65+yo's were getting vaccinated by then. So, no, I'm not impressed. I'm sure the CDC is very pleased with itself. I do think this new travel guidance foretells that the CDC may issue the "technical details" they've been promising for over 4 months to the cruise industry. Mayor Cava, of Miami-Dade Co's statement on Twitter suggests something may be forthcoming on that. I'm not holding my breath. We've heard this before. Like Michael Bailey, I'm feeling pretty sure that whatever guidance they do release won't be much different that the what was outlined in October - a 4 phase return to cruising with each ship being required to pass muster before passengers can board and sail. There may be a casual nod from the CDC regarding the impact that requiring vaccinations to board might have but that will be about it. ANd then we have this ........ .........FL's Governor Desantis just issued an EO banning businesses in FL from requiring any kind of documentation of vaccination to enter. This is going to be a mess.

That's the thing. Almost a contradiction in terms. We have rapidly rising case numbers in most of Europe and plenty of cruising going on out of ports there (an in Asia). Not full on cruising but it's cruising. What's more, is that I read that since large ship cruise lines have been operating on a regular basis there, there have been 19 confirmed COVID cases NINETEEN out of what is being reported as 400K passengers. That's an infection rate of 0.006% Obviously the safe to sail protocols that are being used apparently consistently among the cruise ships that are operating are working very well. That's all well and good but it doesn't matter to government officials making public health policy. We've been down this road. We know for a fact that SARS2 is much more transmissible than influenza (I've read 4 to 8x). Based on the increased transmissibility of SARS2 v H1N1 concerns, I'm consistently reading a significant amount of worry regarding the potential downsides, from both a health and political standpoint, of greater mobility and the increased human contact that entails. Fear of stoking COVID outbreaks permeates health policy thinking. That's the fly in the ointment right now and I don't see an end to it until vaccines produce the kind of measurable declines in COVID metrics I mentioned above.

The science is solid on the risk of air travel as a means of introducing SARS2 and it's variants into countries that have obtained low levels of circulating virus. The reality is that an infected person can have a negative COVID test before boarding an aircraft because their viral load was too low to be detectible (the incubation period), then, once in country, develop mild symptoms or be asymptomatic and spread whatever it is that person is carrying. Public Health officials around the globe are going to hold off on green-lighting travelers coming from foreign destinations by air, sea or traveling by ground conveyance across boarders, I'm guessing, well into the fall when, it is anticipated, most countries can see a level of herd immunity that (1) is defined by low levels of circulating virus (low R values and positivity in the 3-5% range) and (2) health care facilities have returned to a pre-pandemic baseline of seriously ill patients to include those admitted with a diagnosis of COVID. This reality is starting to soak in for me. There are simply too many obstacles for Americans who want to cruise from Europe to overcome to make that a realistic hope. There are, of course, a lot of wild cards that could change that circumstance for the good or further toward the bad, but right now cruising from Europe with port stops along the way for Americans isn't looking good.

I'm generally in agreement with you, JLMoran. People who have actually experienced serious illness form COVID or had a friend or relative in that group or worse, someone who died secondary to COVID, have a completely justifiable bias for caution. About a month ago when I was writing about this stuff, I listed the probabilities of events like serious injuries in a motor vehicle accident, dying from cancer, a whole bunch of them that I can't recall, compared to the probability of serious complications or death from becoming infected with SARS-2. Most of these bad outcomes had higher probabilities of occurring than serious illness from SARS2. My thinking was not meant to diminish the terrible impact on humanity of this pandemic but rather to take comparisons to ground and demonstrate that the social and economic costs of heavy handed mitigation measures were not justified by the benefits obtained from them. To be clear, I have for along time been an advocate of reopening schools. Not willy-nilly re-opening but doing it safely with all the mitigation measures we understand that work in that environment as part of re-opening. So, I admit a bias less cautious about all of this than some. YMMV.

I'll use COVID data from FL yesterday to illustrate how important it is to contextualize that data. As word11 notes above, the reality is this is not a group (school age kids) we need to worry about ...." New case numbers are up as they are in many states that, like FL, still had a lot of circulating virus even when numbers were trending downward up until two weeks ago. FL is unique in that there has been a large inflow of visitors to the state, especially in S.FL. That new cases haven't jumped off the charts is noteworthy. Positivity is up to 6.7%. It had gotten down to as low as 4.8%. So, yes, there is circulating SARS-2 virus in FL..... there is circulating virus ALL THE TIME and we're not shutting things down over that. 79% of new cases are in the under 65 age group with the biggest percentages of new cases in the 15-34yo range. Over 65s as a group account for just 6%. Under 15 accounts for the rest or about 13% Deaths are stable, hospitalizations are down, ED visits for ILI and CLI are down. This is a clear indication that the virus is no where near as dangerous a it was a year ago and as vaccines continue to roll-out. Upwards of 80% of health care and nursing home staff, first responders and over 65s have received at least one dose of a vaccine. This cohort has been generally rendered safe. It does not take a rocket scientist to make rational conclusions based on this data. Here are mine: Most of the 79%'ers are suffering a common cold at worst or are asymptomatic. I don't think we should be concerned about this cohort as no effort whatsoever is made to protect anyone from catching the common cold or influenza. School age kids who get infected are around 98% asymptomatic. For states that made a concerted effort to prioritize vaccines to the most vulnerable, I can mount a solid argument that both vaccinated, recovered under 65s and unvaccinated under 50s, without other risk factors for COVID complications, can do pretty much what they want taking basic precautions - and in that I would include wearing a mask indoors in public spaces and avoiding congregate settings where social distancing can't be maintained. The rest of the US either doesn't have circulating virus to be concerned about or are in a similar situation to that of FL. I just don't get the defective and increasingly irrelevant PH guidance and this continuing drum beat of rising case numbers. We're at a point where that kind of data is pretty much useless in a circumstance where vaccines are becoming widely available. Starting yesterday, in FL, if you're 18 or over, you can get the shot. There's plenty of vaccine availability and plenty of places to sign up to register for an appointment and get the shot. The cost of waiting around for more certainty about this and that is just stupid..... and dangerous: Car-jackings by teenagers who are generally out of school and unsupervised during the day are up 300% in some cities. Gun violence, well, all you have to do is tune in to your local news, is out of control. Fentanyl OD is up all over the country and not by small amounts. Child abuse is up - and that's not just recently. It's been surging since last July. But, yeah, sure, lets just wait for absolute certainty on vaccines, vaccine side effects, all of the pandemic related "science" before we start encouraging people to return to normal activities in ways that incur the lowest risk of catching the virus or spreading it if you do.

I have a lot of stories to tell about dining in main dining rooms. Most of them good. It's great way to socialize and meet new people but, if your looking for a quiet intimate dinner, that's a legitimately hard one. I suspect quieter more intimate dinning will be a lot easier when cruising resumes with table spacing both in the main and specialty dining spots. We used to book the biggest table we could book. Met some really fun people who, after a glass of wine or so got more fun. That was great when most people dined in the main dining rooms but as specialty dining expanded and folks took that up, we had a couple of experiences where we were seated at 10-tops and we were it! No problem getting reseated with other guests but our first night at that 10-top for 2 we had a good time with our waiters sitting at opposite ends of this very long table as if we were the king and queen. They got a good laugh out of that. We now take our chances with 4 and 6 tops. Most cruisers we've found are pretty gregarious but there's always the duds or complainers. We're loath to move around so, we smile and make the best of it. Had one guy pull out some floss and do his teeth after the meal - and not surreptitiously! Otherwise a nice guy who was partnered with a complainer. A double whammy of bad! Those are the exception though. We still favor the mains just to meet new people and talk over a good meal. Nothing better.

This. The press release lacking any data points is understandable. As I recall Pfizer did the same sort of preliminary press release thing when the trials of their mRNA vaccines were completed. The actual trial data was released about two weeks later. Then the FDA took about a month to complete their review facing a lot of pressure to issue the EUA. I also recall that when the AZ vaccines were in this circumstance they released preliminary data and NAIAID (Fauci's show) questioned the validity of it. Whatever NIAAID was worried about should not have been made public, especially what it turned out they were worried about (10ths of percentage points). It may have been leaked by interested parties in doing vaccine damage. Regardless, just another example of poor insight and a broad understanding of statement impacts coming from the faces of our public health policy. Given the probability that there is somewhere in the neighborhood of 25% of the US population who will refuse to get vaccinated for various reasons, some good, some not so good, this kind of thing has the potential of wrongly increasing that pool and gives anti-vaxers more fuel for their fire. Think it through people. Anyway, the prelims are good news. Getting the study report containing the data points will be much better.

In a minor bit of good news, Pfizer had been running a trail using their mRNA vaccine on kids 12 to 16. They just released trial results indicating it's safe. The announcement pre-dates published and reviewed data so, it's going to be a while before the FDA approves it for use in the US. Small trial size of around 3000 kids. Minor and typical side effects. Pfizer has not released data on how the kids' immune systems responded. Still, this is good news. Doomsayers have been bemoaning the difficulty in achieving herd immunity when kids under 16, who can become infected, be generally asymptomatic but still spread the virus, aren't being vaccinated. They can sit down now and be quiet. Just a gut feeling but back in March of 2020, all the models were predicting pandemic outcomes that were never obtained. Science didn't know much about SARS2 then so, OK. We do know a lot more now but morons within the scientific and medical community with disparate agendas are still talking doom. Take the doomsday talk in but carefully evaluate what is being said and put it in context. We're doing fine and moving to the endpoints I mentioned in a post yesterday.

Good stuff esmoov. I entered Fort Lauderdale and PCR and got probably a dozen locations that were close enough to me to make sense. None of the rapid PCR tests are cheap. Checked the first two on the list and prices were right around $200 or a shade below. The linked web site is very easy to use and well laid out.

I hate to keep dumping on the CDC but I feel that this is important to understand among our group of cruise fanatics. The reason is that when confronted with arguments against a resumption of cruising, you'll be armed with the facts. The news this morning was about travel. Lots of it. United made more money in the last month than they did since march of 2020! Surprise, people are traveling. With out a doubt this sort of thing has the potential to increase human contact and spread disease. And what is new about that! Restricting travel and mobility are prime ways to reduce the spread of a global pandemic. Fine, I get that.Hello, humans will be human. They are generally ignoring government pleas to stay in your homes to stop COVID. This is happening everywhere on the planet not just i n the US. After a year of locking people inside their homes, shutting airports and sea ports, directing businesses to have employees not come to the office and instead work from home, closing businesses in the travel and leisure sector, citizens in various countries are saying to hell with that. I'm going to my local bar or restaurant, I'm jumping on an airplane and flying to some Caribbean island that wants us to be there or Mexican resort in Cancun or Madrid or any number of places that are saying, "come on down!" Some of that activity is being carried out carelessly and without regard for the continuing risk of SARS2 transmission and if we were gettting better messaging from public health officials the impact of that on disease spread could be reduced.When Angela Merkle said, I'm locking all you German citizens down for the 2 weeks that include Easter, there was such outrage that she backed off a shut down entirely. The French have never been enthusiastic about Macron telling them to not go out and drink wine. Italians? Same. Then, of course we have the Swedes that took a different path of figuring out how to cope with the virus from the start, instead of trying to eliminate any risk that you might catch COVID. They seem to be doing about the same as other EU countries. Well, no kiddding. Governments ..... it's time to wake up.What's not getting enough attention is the on-the-ground reality of the impact of vaccines. If I put together a graph of two variables, vaccination rates and serious illness on the Y axis and time in months on the X axis, color coded vaccination rates in blue and serious illness and death in red, you'd have a positive slope on the blue line and a negative one on the red with the lines intersecting sometime in May. Forget about putting case numbers on the graph but if you did you'd continue to see the predictable peaks and troughs over time with peaks getting lower and troughs deeper. It's what viruses due. It's what SARS2 has done for over a year.Now, yes, we can think about things like variants that might render these miracle vaccines less effective delaying the decline in serious illness over time. But, I'm telling you, vaccination science involving genomic technology (that's the novel mRNA vaccines) have revolutionized vaccine development and production making it much easier to adapt vaccines to genomic variations in a given virus and provide boosters. Trust me and many other experts who are saying SARS2 is going to become a seasonal thing just like H1N1 Influenza and all it's variants. But the disease burden that was very high from this virus a year ago has steadily declined over that same period and will continue to do so in the long term.Why is this so hard to understand among government officials who are making public health policy? The smart thing to do is to tell businesses how to minimize viral spread in their places of business (already being done, e.g., airlines and the cruise industry) and, more importantly, tell citizens how to safely return to normal activities - because that's what the citizens are going to do anyway whether you tell them how to make it safe or not. The right approach is to recognize that over time in a pandemic (global) circumstance, there will be a predictable transitioning to an epidemic (regional) and then to small (local) outbreaks. At that point outbreaks are easily ID'ed and controlled (see the Ebola virus experience and many others). And, shockingly, this is exactly the circumstance expanding availability of SARS2 vaccines and the miracle technology that can adapt vaccines going forward are making obvious.

On Walenski’s statement yesterday and her doomsday prediction ……. Look, new case numbers are rising, right? She's a smart woman and there are a lot of smart folks around her ...... drops head and sulks, "she's probably right." The pandemic is going to go on and continue to interrupt normal life for years. Wait, I have some questions: In what age group are cases rising? Should we be overly concerned about transmission in the 18-35 crowd where it has been clear for months that this cohort has mild symptoms from an infection? Are at risk groups dying at a higher rate because younger people are getting infected and spreading it to higher risk groups? If so, wouldn't that mean increasing deaths, CFR and hospitalizations? Where are these rising case numbers occurring? Which regions of the country and world are approaching or even reaching herd immunity and doing well? What is the impact of vaccines on serious illness, deaths and transmission rates across all age groups? Do you think it's just possible that focusing more on a vaccine drive, getting everyone in the US vaccinated might be better than doomsday predictions? CONTEXT is completely missing and has been since the beginning of the number crunching designed to track the course of SARS2 pandemic. The messaging coming from the world renowned CDC is counterproductive. Going forward there are discernible end points. They aren't tomorrow or next week or even next month but the US and other countries that have their vaccination programs up and running are moving toward them. I’m pretty sure that the CDC sees Americans as not smart enough to understand the nuances, the subtleties of significant improvement in the word's chances to end the pandemic. With that end comes a return to something less than but very much like pre-pandemic life. Instead, they keep beating the “hold on for a while” drum. The way to talk about this is by outlining the progress and the risks going forward and how to lessen their impact that might delay a return to normal life in a post SARS2 pandemic world. I found this article yesterday. It's long, detailed and very encouraging. There author defines to important pandemic related endpoints. (1) Resumption of mostly unrestricted life and commerce, (2) Herd immunity that follows and results in other than sporadic virus outbreaks that are easily controlled. Takeaways include from the article linked below: The US will probably reach herd immunity in the third quarter. In anticipation of that, PH officials will start, or should start, easing mobility restrictions along with prohibitions on certain type of activities. There are risks to achieving those two end points: SARS2 variants rendering vaccines less effective in preventing disease and transmission, immunity from previous infection or vaccination being of shorter duration than most anticipate, vaccine supply and/or distribution delays and interruptions among a few other. In this report, and contrary to the Walenski dire warnings, scant mention is made of doomsday scenarios or a need for humans to "not let their guard down" .... whatever that actually means. Hide in the basement, don't go out at all? I have no idea because the central thrust of our public health messaging is that impending doom is close. It's not on how to safely and responsibly go about one's life in the current circumstance. Specifically, with increasing vaccine availability, vaccination rates and proven reduced transmission rates the pandemic is going to end. Read this and my advice is to take whatever Walenski and the CDC has to say going forward with a grain of salt: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/...9-pandemic-end

This trial studied how many "essential workers" considered to be at high risk of exposure to persons infected with SARS2, by virtue of their line of work, actually became infected over varying times after vaccination. What's behind these 80% effective after the first dose and 90% after the second numbers? 3950 participants. After the first dose of an mRNA vaccine, in a controlled for post vaccination times analysis before the second dose, eight participants tested + for COVID by PCR. After the second dose, also in a controlled for times post vaccination analysis, 3 participants tested + for COVID by PCR Let me reiterate that ....... 3 people out of 3950 got infected after their second vaccine dose > 14d. THREE. You have to read the study if this sort of thing interests you to understand how that data translates to the 80% and 90% numbers. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm7013e3_e&ACSTrackingID=USCDC_921-DM53321&ACSTrackingLabel=MMWR Early Release - Vol. 70%2C March 29%2C 2021&deliveryName=USCDC_921-DM53321 The study did not evaluate whether or not the 8 participants that became infected were capable of transmitting the disease. In other studies that have looked at this it has been found that subjects who did become infected with SARS after becoming vaccinated had significantly lower viral loads. What that translates to is a lower likelihood an infected person can pass SARS2 on to an uninfected person. This trail data suggests that on a cruise ship having around 4000 passengers and crew on board, you might get 3 infections regardless of symptoms displayed by an infected person who might have boarded during the cruise. Given how the cruise lines have layered mitigation measures that include pre-boarding PCR testing, onboard surveillance (random rapid tests), ID and isolation of COVID + persons and contact tracing, the risk of a bad COVID outcome on a cruise ship is so small as to be negligible - the cruise lines want it that way and have done a remarkable job of insuring that will be the norm on all operating cruise ships.

........ and the CDC does what to the CSO in response to facts?

This is the downside of jumping in with both feet early on. You're going to pay a premium that appears to be increasing day by day as demand outstrips supply for airline seats, hotel rooms and cabin fares. For most here, I don't think this is a barrier as we all want to get going. Besides the cruise lines need our money after a year of loosing millions a week for nearly 60 straight weeks. I personally don't have a problem with paying premiums to cruise. The rest of it just pure capitalism and the economics of that. My own experience with Celebrity demonstrated this. I aggressively pursued booking Millennium ouf of St. Maartin 0n 6/12. Cabin fares stayed stable during the week I was involved in investigating costs and hurdles. But supply of the best cabins dried up quickly. Airfares went through the roof except for the most inconvenient times and routings out of Miami. AA economy seats previously going for $380pp, NS, RT to SXM, quickly rose to over $1Kpp for NS routing/reasonable times. Hotel rates, usually very expensive in St. Maartin, actually went down. That's competition as resorts are starved for bookings. Happy hunting. It's fun to be back in the game.

The cruise lines have done everything they can do to clear the air on infection control measures in all phases of cruise ship operations and articulate how an infected passenger or crew member would be handled in the unlikely event an infection occurs on a cruise ship that is operating routinely and has fully vaccinated crew and guests. We know this stuff cold. The general public doesn't. The visuals of the Ruby Princess and stranded cruise ships and passengers being portrayed by the MSM on TV and on social media as a major health crisis was disastrous. Those visuals are burned into the public's memories. That cruising is wrongly associated with elitists doesn't help. While we write about it here and praise politicians who advocate for a return to cruise operations out of US ports, the general public doesn't give a horse's patoot about whether cruise operations resume or not. While it's true our political representatives do respond to issues citizens they represent raise and we're seeing that, I'm not at all optimistic that it's going to move the needle toward a restart. For us, it's a huge problem. For most of those governed by western style governments, it's just not.

Your welcome Nessa. You may know I'm a retired PA. I'm following the research on C-19 and SARS2 closely. I'm not going to share any of the information in the link below on this forum with you because of the forum rules. But see if you get your daughter to read this. https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20210112/why-covid-vaccines-are-falsely-linked-to-infertility

Neesa, here's a link to pretty current article from one source - I've found it to be very good for all travel related questions. Rapid PCR tests can be obtained but the more quickly you need the results, the more it will cost and themore research it will take on your part to find a location near you that can produce test results in < 48h. I share your concerns over the scary wait for test results when your travel depends on getting one. After reading the article, while it provides some good insight into the process of getting rapid PCR based results it didn't seem to allay concerns I'd have ...... at least you'll be well read on the question. https://thepointsguy.com/guide/where-to-get-covid-test-travel/

The basis of the NSO and what amounts to an extension of it - the CSO - is the PHE. The PHE engages various provisions of Maritime and immigration law - specifically the process by which ports authorize or deny the operations of ships in those ports. That allows enforcement of the no-sail provision by the Department of the Treasury through the USCG. If that sounds complicated and obtuse, that's because it is.

This is why the CDC's imposition via the NSO and CSO on free trade and unrestrained commerce seems like such an easy target for a law suit. I dunno, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. One thing I feel fairly confident about is that the declaration of a PHE gives enormous authority to government that appears on its face to be entirely lawful. We ought to be concerned about that in the future.

Interesting stuff smokeybandit ....... I looked at the cases on the first 4 pages involving the Biden and Trump administrations. I didn't find anything involving HHS and the PHE. I'm not certain but it seems that attorneys have probably looked at HHS's authority to issue PHE's and found them lawful. I still hold, unless shown otherwise, that mounting a successful suit against the FEDs in this narrowly defined circumstance is a non-starter. Too many obstacles to a successful challenge.

To me, as a narrowly described PH policy matter for governments to grapple with, this is so freaking obvious it defies understanding. The way public health policy is derived in the US government exposes existent structural deficiencies. IOW, there's no clean mechanism whereby the executive can weigh risks and benefits, and in the process consider multiple factors, in making and implementing policy decisions. As cruise fans and wrt the CSO, we're stuck with that reality.

Wrong headed and I agree with you. But I reiterate, on the basis of the available science their positions are defensible from a purely public health perspective. Now comes the hard part: You have to assume public health agencies should know their roles and that is an advisory one to the executive. The executive should take inputs from multiple sources when weighing the consequences of various emergency measures. I think what we're seeing in most western governments is a default to weighting the risks of COVID disease burden over the economic and social costs absent the impact of vaccinations. Vaccinations would tend to weight the scale in favor of the benefit to local economies of a return to cruise ship operations. That brings us to the importance of vaccination rates. The higher those are by region and specific port location the less risky cruise ship operations become and the more sense it makes to restart cruise ship operations.