Why Are So Many People Still Getting Covid on Cruise Ships?

Aren't the Jabs Totally Effective?

Stock prices for major cruise liners. Sure, their policies are totally sustainable and sane. Meh, let them burn.

I’ve been on one cruise in my life. I suspect for a lot of reasons it will be my first and last one. A little before I turned 21 I got some type of student loan refund after I transferred colleges, as my new university had a much lower tuition rate than my old one. It had been an unexpected windfall and totaled close to $4000. Being young and dumb I wanted to spend this sudden bolus on a cool trip somewhere. For those of you chiding my fiscal irresponsibility, by the way, I paid off my student loans in 2009.

I was thinking of going someplace exotic and adventurous, like Africa or Australia. I wanted to go with my boyfriend though, who at the time nixed that idea. Those places could be dangerous and scary and we’d need passports and that would be a hassle. Why didn’t we just go on a cruise in Hawaii instead? I like the ocean and I had never been there. Why not?

The cruise itself was one of those trips comprised of what they used to call newlyweds and nearly deads. It was almost 100% adults, with most quite a bit older than us. It wasn’t bad, really. We were shuttled off to one overpriced excursion after another. I got to see four different Hawaiian islands and got to see a lot of the tourist highlights.

It wasn’t for me at all. I noticed most of the cruisers were in a cult of safetyism that made no sense to me. They’d talk about how robbers and pickpockets would strip them blind if they ventured out of our tight little tour bus circle. Everything was safe and guarded on that cruise ship fortress. The tours were like class field trip excursions when I’d been in middle school.

I only had cheap tickets stuck in a tiny room smaller than a parking space somewhere in the bottom hull of that boat. I felt like I might be buried alive down there. If this thing went down like the Titanic I would be the first to go under millions of metric tons of water. I guess I just don’t assume that anything can be made risk free.

I’m thankful that I had three days left after the cruise in Maui. We rented a car and did whatever we wanted, though I realized at Haleakala National Park on seeing the whole of Maui that the island would get too claustrophobic for me to ever want to live there. I celebrated my birthday eating poi with some locals at an impromptu party in Lahaina. One of the staff of the hotel gave us a ride to the airport afterwards in exchange for our cooler of leftover beer and steaks. He sheepishly admitted that he had never been to the mainland United States. I discovered from that adventure that I was a traveler and not a tourist. “This grips me more than would a muddy old river or reclining Buddha”, I suppose, to quote Murray Chess in One Night in Bangkok.

That cult of safteyism came back to me on reading that most cruise ships, particularly those going to Alaska, have been quietly experiencing massive Covid outbreaks. Apparently they don’t want to talk about it anymore. And why would that be? Well pulling up the jab policy on Royal Caribbean, as one example:   

“FOR CRUISES DEPARTING FROM NORTH AMERICA (U.S., PUERTO RICO, CANADA)

All Royal Caribbean guests age 12 and older must present proof of full COVID-19 vaccination with the final dose of their vaccine administered at least 14 days before sailing. Kids age 11 or younger who have been vaccinated may present proof of full vaccination and follow the protocols for vaccinated guests. While we do not require kids 11 or younger than to be vaccinated, many are and it is highly likely destinations will begin to require guests age 5 and older to be vaccinated. We will notify booked guests as this guidance evolves.

Each guest’s regimen must include at least two doses of vaccine unless the guest received the single dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. This is per U.S. CDC guidance, and no exceptions will be made, even if the guest's resident country has authorized a single-shot regimen for a two dose vaccine.

We strongly recommend that fully vaccinated guests receive a booster dose when they become eligible to do so, though it is currently not required to be considered fully vaccinated. It is highly likely many destinations will soon begin to require booster doses for all eligible guests to be considered fully vaccinated. We will notify booked guests as this guidance evolves.

Royal Caribbean will not accept a Certificate of Recovery in lieu of vaccination for guests of vaccine eligible age.”

All the cruise ship policies on conjab “vaccines” look virtually the same as this. Some have narrow exceptions outlined for children too young to be jabbed and the nearly dead who are so nearly dead that they have a valid medical exemption. One can logically assume however, that unless you’re on a Disney Cruise or something catering specifically to young children that the rate of “vaccination” on these ships is very, very, very high.  

So we’ve got these floating petri dishes. They’re tested for Covid before the embark. But since they’re all jabbed they should be totally safe, right? Just one more thing.

“As of Friday, 85 of 93 cruise ships in U.S. waters have reported at least one case of COVID onboard,” Said the following report”

“For Adrian Johnson, who went on a seven-night cruise to Alaska on Royal Caribbean’s Alaska Glacier, the trip was good until the final night. The crew was friendly and always masked, and the health protocols were reassuring.

He traveled with his girlfriend, his girlfriend’s mother and sister-in-law and his two sisters. On the last night on the ship, Johnson started feeling feverish. He had a inkling it was COVID, but he decided to get tested when he got home in Ballard a few hours later.

His at-home test result was positive for COVID. Out of the six people in his group, five were infected with the coronavirus, Johnson said.

He said he’s not sure when he was infected. His group tried to distance themselves from other people as much as they could, though that was impossible at the casino and the theater, where only a few people wore masks, Johnson said.”

All I can say is what a nightmare. And facemasks don’t work. And jabs don’t work. And social distancing doesn’t work either, unless you live in the middle of nowhere.

They seem to be having staffing problems too:

“Very understaffed,” he said. “We did not have shows on — we only had like, two shows on the whole of the cruise. Lack of entertainment, lack of entertainment for kids.”

There were long lines to disembark, facilities on board that were shuttered — even eating became disappointing. His whole family is vegetarian, and he was told the kitchen was too short staffed to cook up proper meals for them.

Day after day, “the SAME thing. I mean, yeah, not even a few things, the same things. So whatever we ate in lunch, we ate in dinner,” he said.

His family ate a lot of lentil soup with rice.”

Well that sounds like fun. I couldn’t help but remember the cult of safetyism about a lot of cruiser types. It felt like an alternate reality to read account after account of a usually TRIPLE JABBED person, who always wore facemasks, who is so angry about some excursion where they heaven forbid dined with other people or other people weren’t wearing masks and they somehow got Covid. At what point do you realize that the MASKS and the JABS DON’T WORK? Do they ever realize this instead of projecting their frustration onto anonymous others who weren’t following the rules? The rules that don’t work to begin with?

I’d say the most horrific account to me was of a man who tested positive on the ship and had to quarantine in his room for most of the cruise. I thought of being in a tiny room smaller than a jail cell on a rocking boat under water. I remember the Dramamine.

At what point do we stop the talk of “if it saves only one life” and start counting the dead bodies from the at best worthless policies instead?