It will be two years in February that the cruise liner "Diamond Princess", considered one of the first clusters of the Covid-19 pandemic, was placed in quarantine in a Japanese port. Today, after a brief recovery in June, cruise line activity is once again threatened by the arrival of the Omicron variant. Thus, more than 60 cruise ships are the subject of investigations by the American health authorities after the appearance of cases of Covid-19 on board, can we read this Sunday on the site of the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) , the leading public health agency in the United States. These 60 vessels have reached the “threshold” set by the CDC to merit such an investigation.
According to the Washington Post daily, several ships have been refused a stopover in several Caribbean ports.
One of them, the Carnival Freedom, was thus not allowed to moor on the Dutch island of Bonaire.
“We sail aboard a Petri dish” (a container used in laboratories for the culture of bacteria), quipped Ashley Peterson, a 34-year-old Carnival Freedom passenger, to the Washington Post.
“I feel like I spent last week at a super-propagating event.
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In a statement, the company Carnival Cruises confirmed that a "small number on board had been isolated due to a positive test for Covid".
The Carnival Freedom arrived in Miami on Sunday morning, disembarked all of its passengers, and "will depart for its next trip as scheduled," the company said.
During the next trips, "if it becomes necessary to cancel a stopover, we will do our best to find an alternative destination," says Carnival.
95% vaccinated on board
On Wednesday, another company, Royal Caribbean International, said 55 people had tested positive for Covid-19 on board one of its ships that left Florida on December 18. Those infected include passengers and crew, although 95% of those on board are vaccinated against the coronavirus. The boat was not allowed to stop in Curaçao and Aruba, islands of the Netherlands Antilles. He was to stay at sea until his return to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, scheduled for Sunday. It was the second outbreak of coronavirus to be identified on a Royal Caribbean boat in less than a week.
The coronavirus had caused the suspension of cruise activities for more than a year.
They resumed in June with a series of measures to try to keep the virus at bay, such as the compulsory vaccine for employees and passengers over 12 years old for Royal Caribbean for example.
But the highly contagious Omicron variant presents a new challenge and the number of Covid-19 cases in the United States continues to rise, with nearly 190,000 new cases daily over the past seven days on average, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
