Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going

[marmar]

Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going
More than 1,500 people on the company’s cruise ships have been diagnosed with Covid-19, and dozens have died.

By Austin Carr and Chris Palmeri


(Bloomberg) The news, when it reached the Grand Princess early on March 4, barely registered at first. In a letter slipped under passenger cabin doors, Grant Tarling, Carnival Corp.’s chief medical officer, announced that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control had begun “investigating a small cluster” of Covid-19 cases in California that might have been linked to the ship. Thirteen days after leaving San Francisco for Hawaii, the vessel would be skipping a scheduled stop in Mexico on its return voyage and sailing back early to its Bay Area port.

That day, passengers noticed new hand sanitizer stations and crew members wearing gloves, but life on the Grand Princess, which advertises 1,301 cabins, 20 restaurants and lounges, about a dozen shops, and four freshwater swimming pools, otherwise went on as normal. Guests prepared for a ukulele concert, played bridge at shared tables, and took line-dancing classes. That night, Laurie Miller and her husband, John, attended True or Moo, a show featuring an emcee in a cow costume; the following morning, John joined about 200 other passengers in the ship’s Broadway-style theater for a lecture on Clint Eastwood movies. “I’m surprised they’re even letting this event happen,” he whispered to a nearby friend. “This is a big crowd.”

Around lunchtime on March 5, the ship’s captain, John Smith, announced a quarantine over the ship’s public address system. All 2,422 passengers needed to go to their cabins to shelter in place. Laurie Miller was in the Da Vinci dining room eating chocolate peanut butter ice cream. “Oh my God,” she remembers thinking. “This is real.” Then she ordered more ice cream.

Other passengers ambled to the ship’s stores and dining areas, too, to take advantage of the perks while they could. “Evvverrrybody went to the buffet,” recalls 61-year-old Debbi Loftus, who was traveling with her parents. “I just thought, Oh, crap, the ukulele concert is going to be canceled.” Crowds of elderly guests filed to their cabins through narrow hallways and down the stairs of the ship’s 17 decks. Sixty-nine-year-old Karen Dever tried an elevator only to find it packed with fellow passengers. “So much for social distancing!” she joked aloud. ........(more)

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-carnival-cruise-coronavirus/

[mitch96]

1. I guess this would be treated like the food borne Norovirus and blow over...

It didn't..........
m

[marmar]

2. Yep. That's exactly what they were planning on.

[Mike 03]

3. Long but highly recommended investigative journalism.

During Bloomberg Businessweek’s March 27 phone interview with Swartz, reports surfaced that four more people had died and at least 138 passengers were sick aboard another Carnival ship, the Zaandam, part of its Holland America line. Over the following days, the ship lingered near the coast of Fort Lauderdale waiting for government permission to dock at Port Everglades, Fla. Yadira Garza, who embarked on the Zaandam for her honeymoon, says from the ship that she and her husband are terrified. “The crew are sick and getting sicker. It’s a matter of time before it gets to us and we’re infected,” she says. “For some people, it will be the last trip of their lives.”

As of early April, Carnival still had passengers at sea, nearly a month after the CDC issued a March 8 public advisory to “defer all cruise ship travel worldwide.” Spokesperson Frizzell says Carnival wasn’t under any legal obligation to follow the CDC’s advice. “The advisory is not an edict,” he says.

Donald and Swartz say there’s nothing they could’ve done to halt further infections in February, when, they say, the world still didn’t grasp how much the virus was spreading outside China. But the U.S. declared a public health emergency and restricted travel to China on Jan. 31, even as Carnival ships continued to sail around Asia. There were other early warnings: Padgett, the innovation chief, says that in January—after he’d communicated with a manufacturer in Wuhan, the origin of the pandemic, about making batteries for the digital badge system—the leadership, including Arnold Donald, all knew about the scale of the coronavirus outbreak. Padgett says he became aware of the problem’s magnitude on Jan. 25—he remembers the exact date because it was the day before Kobe Bryant died. “The biggest thing about that—it’s a learning I don’t think I’ll ever forget, and we shared it with Arnold when we were talking—is that we actually had insight into the global situation much earlier than most,” Padgett says. Carnival canceled cruises set to embark from mainland Chinese ports, but these measures don’t appear to have altered anything for ships making midcruise stops around Hong Kong or other parts of Asia.

[crickets]

4. Money, and the bravery of being out of range.

The people who make the decisions never have to set foot on the ships.