Originally published at: CDC stops reporting COVID-19 cases on cruise ships | Boing Boing
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Cruise ships were infamous as incubators for diseases like norovirus, E. coli and measles even before the Covid-19 pandemic. No thank you.
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You don’t need the CDC program to know that yes, the cruise ship you want to take has covid outbreaks.
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True. All you need is a search engine, and something like this pops up:
The part that gets downplayed in the press is the protocols used by cruise lines. Folks who want to take the risk of cruising should find out how travel companies, insurance companies, and government agencies deal with passengers who test positive for COVID. There are few stories about travelers who found out the hard way that their insurance did not cover the costs of quarantine (or were stranded somewhere without access to healthcare and alternate transportation home).
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Yes. My wife loves cruising but she even suggests it now and I just have to show her how much of a petri dish they’ve become to dissuade her.
I wasn’t super fond of the Disney trip she talked me into, but at least they tried to put a strong façade of battling against infection with a lot of sanitation visibly going on.
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Some of my elderly relatives cannot be convinced to stay at home now, since they have had four doses of vaccine. Two couples have taken three different cruises in the past year. They’re all in their 70s and 80s, though, so their attitudes are different than mine. 
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Midterms coming up… so laissez-faire governance it is… for now.
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Same here. I wasn’t interested in hopping aboard one of these floating petri dishes/casinos/malls before Covid.
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My second in command is going on a cruise in about a month. She and her son have been double vaxxed and boosted. I hope when they roll the dice it doesn’t come up snake eyes.
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I already had no interest in cruises before Covid. Now, you couldn’t pay me to get on one of those floating plague ships.
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What’s particularly maddening about that PR flak emission is that it’s a strong argument against stopping the collection and reporting of the data presented as though it’s a plausible reason for stopping.
If the cruise industry didn’t have the necessary tools then the statistics would be useful in terms of letting people know just how bad their odds were when considering a cruise and letting public health entities know how aggressively to test/quarantine/route directly to medical waste incinerators people returning from cruises; but that would be the extent of it.
If they do; then infection statistics are essentially part of a QA/QC loop where gathering the data on infections is an essential element to determining how effectively the tools are being implemented and whether or not the available tools are indeed sufficient or whether there are gaps where additional capabilities or procedures are needed.
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I look forward to a future in which historians can pinpoint when we slid from The Information Age into Misinformation Mania, and then finally survived the last days of an Epoch of the Ostriches.
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If we just keep doubling down on bad practices we can get ahead of the narrative and score “The Late Before Times were a period of epistemic flexibility and institutional ossification that remains the subject of much scholarly debate”, rather than some more decisive condemnation. That’s practically victory-adjacent, right?
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I mean it’s not even snake eyes really, and I know that’s a figure of speech, but it’s probably nearing 50/50 , especially if it’s transmitting in the community on the closed cruise ship. The latest thing in the fandom I’m in has been “Go to a convention, 1/4 the attendees get COVID, and it doesn’t matter your vax status” Viral load is just too, too high.
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