Cruise ships are returning to Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti amidst reports that four cruise ships (two operated by Princess Cruises and two by Royal Caribbean) are rife with COVID-19. Three of the ships have one hundred or more COVID-19 infected guests on each ship. Royal Caribbean has one ship heading to Australia with reports

Yesterday morning, the United States Coast Guard (USCG) medevaced a sixty-six year old woman from the Ruby Princess cruise ship. The USCG station in Astoria, Oregon dispatched a MH-60 Jayhawk which winched the cruise guest from the Princess cruise ship when the ship was approximately seventy-five miles southwest of the Columbia River Bar near Portland.

When I read the news this morning that a COVID-19 outbreak involving around one-hundred passengers and crew members occurred on the Coral Princess, Princess’s sister ship to the Ruby Princess which had one of the earliest outbreaks of COVID-19 in Australia two years ago, I felt as if I were trapped in a scene

A number of newspapers are reporting today that the Carnival Spirit cruise ship experienced a COVID-19 outbreak. As usual, Carnival Cruise Line refused to respond to requests regarding the number of infected passengers and crew members. Cruise guests on the Carnival cruise ship estimated the outbreak to involve “more than 100 people” and as many

Three recent cruises aboard Princess Cruises cruise ships have involved many dozens of guests testing positive for COVID-19 according to passengers aboard the Caribbean Princess, Ruby Princess and Sky Princess ships. In all three cases, Princess Cruises did not say how many people tested positive, demonstrating the typical lack of transparency by a Carnival Corporation-owned

Carnival Corporation CEO Arnold Donald and other top Carnival cruise executives collected millions of dollars more in compensation in 2020 than in 2019 via stock awards, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week. Cruise Industry News summarized the compensation in an article titled Carnival Corporation Executives Made More Money

Today the Government of Australia extended the ban against cruise travel to a minimum of three months:

Newspapers across Australia report that Australians are restricted from overseas travel or cruise ship holidays for at least three more months as the government extends the biosecurity ban imposed at the start of the pandemic.

The ban

Airborne Transmission of Norovirus

In 2015, doctors participated in a study which determined that norovirus can be transmitted in an airborne form. They published their findings in an article titled Detection and Quantification of Airborne Norovirus During Outbreaks in Healthcare Facilities in the highly respected journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The medical experts concluded

A crew member on the Island Princess died on Wednesday  according to several crew members wishing to remain anonymous.  The crew member’s name is Candido Catambay. There are no facts publicly available regarding the precise circumstances of the crew member’s death.

It appears that the Island Princess is one of many Carnival Corporation-owned cruise ships