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Spain to welcome back international cruises from 7 June


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After reading the details about Spain's announcement, it brings to mind the question regarding how different countries have gone about initially shuttering and now re-opening.

Obviously lots has been learned about SARS2. It is more transmissible than it's brother SARS and has a predilection to produce serious life threatening illness in people over 70, it kills a high percentage of people over 80 that become infected. But it doesn't produce much of anything in people under 40 and usually only the sniffles in kids. Of course there are exceptions - if obesity and/or co-morbid medical conditions (among others) are present that predisposes to more serious illness from infection with SARS2.

Some Public Health services, IMO, were slow to pick-up on this. The response to the pandemic was generally a butcher's knife when a scalpel would have avoided some of the horrendous economic and social costs produced by probably unnecessary and draconian mitigation measures to start  But that's hindsight.

Going forward it seems to me that re-openings are occurring more rapidly in countries that have paid attention to the data - especially regarding the effectiveness of vaccines in the real world. Recognition that SARS2 doesn't seriously impact a large portion of the human race by some countries who took this into account and didn't shut down schools and most businesses or social life was entirely missed by others including the US. The key was and remains recognizing that to avoid catastrophic outcomes from SARS2, assiduously protect the vulnerable and then aggressively vaccinate this cohort when vaccines are available. The rest can mostly go about business as usual.

The US has been, IMO, too quick to the butcher knife and too slow to re-open, with politics getting into every aspect of pandemic management to a fault. That has happened other places but the US's CDC, prior to the current SAR2 pandemic was the worlds leading expert on infectious disease, has performed poorly. It still tends to by hyper-cautious, to a fault, in its recommendations and, in particular, to assumed regulatory authority under the PHE.

Anyway, the world is coming out of this and we'll cruise again, with fits and starts. Halleluiah.  

 

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