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French Chartered Cruise Ends Early


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Confusing article, there should be better accounts somewhere.  It seems to be Good News / Bad News:

GOOD NEWS:

  • Protocols seem to be working.
  • Ships are not becoming human Petri Dishes ... the ship was to disembark on Friday.
  • The cruise line is being very conservative.
  • The last cruise positives (after debark) seem to have very little, or anything, to do with the French Chartered Cruise being cut short.  Again, the article is poorly written.

BAD NEWS:

  • The biggest issue seems to be the country of origin for the passengers (France).  France is suffering an extreme 2nd wave and the cruise line appears to be "blaming" that more than the previous cruise positives.

https://www.cruisehive.com/cruise-cut-short-and-seven-passengers-test-positive/42668

I still think I would be safer on a cruise ship than in my local grocery store.

Fingers are still crossed for MAY 2021 out of Southampton,

 

Curt from Canada

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The French charters are complicated in that there are French nationals departing from Italy and visiting Italy and Greece.  They are 14 day charters.  They may have tried to return to normal too quickly rather than sticking to Italians cruising to Italian ports.  

With the situation in France appearing to spike it's possible additional travel restrictions may be put in place within the EU.  Much like Americans aren't welcome right now, possibly neither should the French.  At some point the border between Italy and France may close again.  If the ship has 600 French nationals on board but they could be in a position where they can't return home to France that places Costa in a very awkward position.  The safe thing to do is get those French nationals back to France ASAP and cancel additional French charters.

Seven of six hundred guests tested positive and were isolated all being asymptomatic.  I am curious what the false positive rate is for the types of tests being used.  No test is 100% accurate.    It doesn't say if additional testing was performed for the seven guests that tested positive on board.  No crew tested positive. 

It appears like the protocols worked but they tried to go big, visiting multiple countries on longer cruises.  That or the 1.1% positive test rate contains some false positives.

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Twangster, I may be wrong about this but I remember reading that on the cruise in question, there were no positives. The crew positives were on a Costa charter that sailed prior to that. It is my understanding that these positives were appropriately dealt with and authorities green lighted the charter we're talking about.

Either way you're spot on regarding the unusual circumstance that Costa has to deal with vis-a-vis a potential closing by the Italians of the Italian - French boarder . These sort of complications highlight the difficulties cruise lines have operating in the COVID environment. There are circumstances that come up that have nothing to do with sound COVID protocols onbaord ship but still impact them in ways that are hard to anticipate.

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I was trusting the Cruise Critic reporting from the link above.

  • The first sailing, with more than 600 charter passengers onboard, left September 28 from Genoa. The 14-day itinerary visited other Italian ports and Greece before returning to Genoa.   When the ship re-entered Italian waters between October 8 and October 9, passengers were required by the government to retest for COVID-19. This is when the seven positive cases -- all were asymptomatic -- were identified, the line said.
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This is also why I have long said that when cruising first returns to the U.S. it should initially only involve U.S. citizens.  As soon as multiple nations are involved that's when things get complicated and politicians make public statements to impress their constituents banning foreigners and causing ships to be denied entry. 

Once we establish that cruising is just like life on land, after several months they can consider allowing more than just U.S. citizens.  Sorry Canucks...

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Two separate sailings of same ship - Costa Diadema per CruiseRadio article:  The first sailing, upon re-entering Italian waters for a port call in Palermo and at the request of the Italian health authorities, all passengers and crew were tested. 7 passengers tested positive, all of them asymptomatic. I'm assuming these passengers debarked and were quarantined - that's not clear. 

Following that event, the crew was required to be tested again. When all received negative results, the second charter cruise was allowed to depart on October 12.

https://cruiseradio.net/mediterranean-cruise-ends-early-over-worsening-outbreak-in-france/

I'm in agreement with your position that all passengers should be US citizens when and if a cruise line restart out of US ports occurs

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4 hours ago, Curt From Canada said:

Protocols seem to be working.

This is always the first thing I look for in any "outbreak" article.

The system is designed around the idea covid could make it on a ship, but the difference should be it doesnt infect everyone else. Contained and isolated.

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16 hours ago, twangster said:

The French charters are complicated in that there are French nationals departing from Italy and visiting Italy and Greece.  They are 14 day charters.  They may have tried to return to normal too quickly rather than sticking to Italians cruising to Italian ports.  

With the situation in France appearing to spike it's possible additional travel restrictions may be put in place within the EU.  Much like Americans aren't welcome right now, possibly neither should the French.  At some point the border between Italy and France may close again.  If the ship has 600 French nationals on board but they could be in a position where they can't return home to France that places Costa in a very awkward position.  The safe thing to do is get those French nationals back to France ASAP and cancel additional French charters.

Seven of six hundred guests tested positive and were isolated all being asymptomatic.  I am curious what the false positive rate is for the types of tests being used.  No test is 100% accurate.    It doesn't say if additional testing was performed for the seven guests that tested positive on board.  No crew tested positive. 

It appears like the protocols worked but they tried to go big, visiting multiple countries on longer cruises.  That or the 1.1% positive test rate contains some false positives.

I fully agree however as a committed European I think we need to stop closing borders.

There is frankly no evidence to suggest that me travelling from one location to another helps spread the virus.

The virus is everywhere and people travelling will not make any significant difference.

 

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6 hours ago, Morganno said:

There is frankly no evidence to suggest that me travelling from one location to another helps spread the virus.

The virus is everywhere and people travelling will not make any significant difference.

Exhibit A that traveling absolutely contributes to spread in other regions (emphasis added, no idea why some of the internal links are insisting on staying at that larger text size).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/10/17/sturgis-rally-spread/

Quote

More than 330 coronavirus cases and one death were directly linked to the rally as of mid-September, according to a Washington Post survey of health departments in 23 states that provided information. But experts say that tally represents just the tip of the iceberg, since contact tracing often doesn’t capture the source of an infection, and asymptomatic spread goes unnoticed.

...While some states and localities banned even relatively small groups of people, others, like South Dakota, imposed no restrictions — in this case allowing the largest gathering of people in the United States and perhaps anywhere in the world amid the pandemic and creating huge vulnerabilities as tens of thousands of attendees traveled back home to every state in the nation.

Many went unmasked to an event public health officials pleaded with them to skip, putting themselves and others at risk, because they were skeptical about the risks, or felt the entreaties infringed on their personal liberties. Rallygoers jammed bars, restaurants, tattoo parlors and concert venues; South Dakota officials later identified four such businesses as sites of potential exposure after learning that infected people had visited them.

The above cited number of cases and death, as the quote states, are from those states that actually did manage to piece together the connection and provide the information to the Post. But even this small number clearly shows that travel 100% helps spread the virus. The people who went to this event were healthy when they left. The event lasted over a week, so if they were sick when they left home they would have known it when they were at the event. These cited cases are all people who didn't get sick until they had already traveled back home.

This paragraph, which actually precedes the above quote, puts in a big caveat:

Quote

Within weeks of the gathering, the Dakotas, along with Wyoming, Minnesota and Montana, were leading the nation in new coronavirus infections per capita. The surge was especially pronounced in North and South Dakota, where cases and hospitalization rates continued their juggernaut rise into October. Experts say they will never be able to determine how many of those cases originated at the 10-day rally, given the failure of state and local health officials to identify and monitor attendees returning home, or to trace chains of transmission after people got sick. Some, however, believe the nearly 500,000-person gathering played a role in the outbreak now consuming the Upper Midwest.

So does something like this definitively lead to a massive outbreak all by itself? No idea, and no way to ever know. But the fact remains that almost half a million people traveled out of their home states while healthy, and some portion of them contracted the virus while at this enormous gathering due to multiple mitigation failures, then brought it home where another not-insignificant portion went on to infect friends, family, and loved ones.

 

6 hours ago, Morganno said:

I think we need to stop closing borders

After all this, I'm not saying that closing borders is the definitive solution. But if people are going to stubbornly refuse to take other mitigating measures when they do travel, then countries, states, etc. may not end up with a choice. Even with those mitigating measures, there is going to be some amount of spread. This cruise that caught the 7 French travelers on board while still asymptomatic shows it, but at least the mitigation measures were successful. Had Italy not insisted on a re-test before entering the country, they could have spread it to people there when multiple parts of Italy are now going through their own resurgence in the virus.

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12 hours ago, Morganno said:

I fully agree however as a committed European I think we need to stop closing borders.

There is frankly no evidence to suggest that me travelling from one location to another helps spread the virus.

The virus is everywhere and people travelling will not make any significant difference.

 

I've been confined to a 5km radius from home since July. Here is what happens when you limit the movement of people:

 image.png.c932cd9d36fe75134dcd9071b258f0f0.png

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4 hours ago, Ray said:

So how did it get out of china? 

44 minutes ago, mattymay said:

I've been confined to a 5km radius from home since July. Here is what happens when you limit the movement of people:

 image.png.c932cd9d36fe75134dcd9071b258f0f0.png

OK, I'm just going to wait for you two to post on stuff like this going forward. ?

 

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