Will the new administration cancel American cruises for 2021?

[_auroraborealis_]

I think it fair to say that DCL won't be the first with a plan or first to sail. They don't even have any ships on this side of the atlantic right now, and need to file updates for 28 days before being allowed to enter US waters as I read the new requirements.

 

[jane01jp]

I thought this quote from CS Lewis might be interesting:

CS Lewis: “Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man.”

 

[spiders]

You'll just have to wait to see what the CDC does. The CDC has been given some very broad and far reaching authority. Some of it has to do with science and some of it does not.

Case in point...there was no reason why cruise ships shouldn't have been able to disembark their crew after they were already out at sea for 30+ days.

 

[PrincessShmoo]

You'll just have to wait to see what the CDC does. The CDC has been given some very broad and far reaching authority. Some of it has to do with science and some of it does not.

Case in point...there was no reason why cruise ships shouldn't have been able to disembark their crew after they were already out at sea for 30+ days.

Except, at the time, the risks of transmission were not known. It was a new disease, with no knowledge of what the transmission method/time was.

 

[spiders]

Except, at the time, the risks of transmission were not known. It was a new disease, with no knowledge of what the transmission method/time was.

Everyone else was still allowed to access airports. Again, they were floating at sea for 30+ days -- it was obvious they didn't have it.

 

[PrincessShmoo]

Everyone else was still allowed to access airports. Again, they were floating at sea for 30+ days -- it was obvious they didn't have it.

Not necessarily. As I said, at the time all the particulars of the disease were unknown. They didn't know if someone was contagious for X amount of time, or only before symptoms were seen, or how many people one person could contaminate. Also unknown, someone can have COVID (and transmit it) without knowing they had the disease.

No way of knowing if everyone onboard would have had the disease at the same time, or the time lapse between cases meant that it would take months to clear everyone onboard.

 

[spiders]

Not necessarily. As I said, at the time all the particulars of the disease were unknown. They didn't know if someone was contagious for X amount of time, or only before symptoms were seen, or how many people one person could contaminate. Also unknown, someone can have COVID (and transmit it) without knowing they had the disease.

No way of knowing if everyone onboard would have had the disease at the same time, or the time lapse between cases meant that it would take months to clear everyone onboard.

We'll have to agree to disagree. Any one of the millions of essentials who were still working could have gone to any airport and boarded a flight (albeit, at a much reduced capacity). They weren't any riskier than any crew members stuck on a cruise ship that was already quarantining itself at sea.

I know I definitely would have been more comfortable getting on a ship that hadn't any received any new people on it in 30 days during than I did going to work during that same time frame in April.

 

[andyman8]

No debate, but the news media cannot declare a President. The electoral college does that, not the news.
That is how I understand it is declared?

The news media, specifically their decision desk/statistician arms (which are very different than their polling arms/partnerships), look at a wide range of data to make these projections. That arm operates basically independently of the rest of the news organization. This year, they were especially cautious, given the unusual dynamics in this election (pandemic/vote-by-mail). If you trusted their projection four years ago or eight years ago, there should be no reason not to trust their projection this year. You don't have to like it, but not trusting it is sort of like those who said that the remaining December sailings disappeared from DCL.com because they were at capacity, not cancelled.

It's also worth keeping in mind that a lot can change between now and late January. As far as I know, no U.S. cruise line has announced a specific re-launch date for U.S. general public sailings, and I find that interesting. I don't think who's President will have as big as an effect on this as one might immediately assume.I think where things go in the next six weeks will have a much, much larger effect on the cruise lines' restart plans. Either way, I think it's a fair to assume that we'll see some of the larger lines announce and perhaps even re-launch before DCL announces something. Remember that WDW announced its reopening on May 27 but no parks reopened until July 11 (basically six weeks later). Given the logistical challenges of re-launching DCL and the massive headache of moving around passengers from different sailings, I think one can expect it to be at least two or more months after the relaunch announcement before DCL starts regular sailings for the general public again. Certainly, they could do it faster (assuming they had already filed their notice with the CDC) but Disney has demonstrated that they're not prioritizing being "first" with these relaunches/reopenings. For example, UOR announced a reopening on May 20 for June 5 reopening but that didn't suddenly mean WDW was reopening much earlier.

 

[Stratus22]

The votes have been counted. It’s over. Get over it and get ready for science to prevail.
According to Science, I should have had covid, 8536 times already....but besides that, I believe we can speculate all day long about what the CDC, Ports and the Cruise lines are going to do. So we wait.

 

[pumpkinqueen93]

All I'm saying is if they do then I'm just gonna cancel and not book anything until sailing officially starts back up.

 

[MsAmerica]

Since Biden has said he will lock us down without hesitation, assume cruises aren't sailing anytime soon.

We had three planned and I've cancelled them all. I can't take being disappointed yet again and if lockdown happens for a second time, financially we are in trouble.

 

[MNtwinsplus1mom]

Since Biden has said he will lock us down without hesitation, assume cruises aren't sailing anytime soon.

We had three planned and I've cancelled them all. I can't take being disappointed yet again and if lockdown happens for a second time, financially we are in trouble.

This is where we’re at in our family. Not hopeful sadly. We canceled our big WDW trip for this year bc we have no interest going with the current restrictions. We had a marvel cruise scheduled for March 2021 that we changed to a western Caribbean for January 2022, but even that honestly I don’t trust. If that’s canceled eventually I’m getting a refund and not going to book anything bc emotionally it’s just easier.

We have been hit financially with a temporary pay cut the exact amount of our WDW trip this year, and if there are more lockdowns Disney gets harder to afford. It can be a spiral. For the good of the country, I want us to move forward at some point with cruising etc. I feel so sad about DCL employees who’ve been let go. And there’s risk in everything in life. This virus isn’t nearly as deadly as the modelers first estimated when the first extreme measures were taken, so honestly it shouldn’t take years to get cruising back & I hope it won’t.

 

[insureman]

How about we be a little more respectful and tolerant of other people so this thread doesn't get shutdown.

 

[Starwind]

As for the original question, in Canada, the PM simply said the harbours were closed to cruises. Could any of the politicians in the U.S. do the same? Maybe it's more a governor level than a federal level, but is that power available to an elected leader or only to the CDC?

While the PM made the public announcement, the restriction is actually done through Transport Canada regulations, as they are the relevant regulatory body. See this backgrounder for when the restrictions through Oct 31 were announced: https://tc.canada.ca/en/initiatives...measures-cruise-ships-other-passenger-vessels It also notes that smaller vessels were subject to provincial/territorial/local requirements.

For the US, this article by the National Conference of State Legislatures gives a good overview of State quarantine and isolation statutes: https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-quarantine-and-isolation-statutes.aspx Even if for reasons they couldn't actually outright close the port [I don't know if they have that authority; eg there may be issues re: interfering in interstate trade and such], they could do things like impose quarantine requirements on anyone entering a state/locality, which could have the effect of nobody would be allowed to get off a ship, or you unless you were a state resident you would have to be eg qurantining for 2 weeks before you could board the ship, which is not feasible for most people.

As for the OP's question, I think there are a lot of factors that are going to influence whether the CDC needs to change its current order wrt cruise ships or stay the course. The one thing the current order has is a lot of *time* built into it, which even if all goes well and everything goes exactly according to plan, means sailing with "actual" passengers (not test sailings) doesn't start until into 2021.

Consider too that even if they were allowed to sail, some of the cruise lines may choose not to if for example, land case # were skyrocketing, as they may not wish to assume the risk. They will have to do their own risk calculations on top of the regulations, which will affect things like how many ships they actually have sailing, itineraries, etc.

As for spreading within a household, the studies I have read where they have looked at covid spread within households have shown that usually the majority of household members do NOT catch it when one member gets infected. While covid is contagious, it is not as contagious as something like measles. There are many factors that will influence the situation of course, from mask-wearing of other household members to once the infected person is known to be infected are they isolated from the others, etc. There is also much that is not known -- the Diamond Princess is a good example for this: they had a range of situations where stateroom mates got it, others where they didn't, others where some did and others didn't... so there is much unknown about why some people catch it and others don't even when they are sharing the confined space of a cruise stateroom with someone who is infectious and presumably similarily exposed. Here is a Public Health Ontario summary of one study looking at household spread of covid: https://www.publichealthontario.ca/...ics-household-transmission-covid-19.pdf?la=en

The info about spreading will have an influence on the rules that get set for how cruise ships handle cases. I assume they will be erring on the side of caution, though. But it informs things like "what do you do when one person in a stateroom develops symptoms/tests positive" in terms of isolating them in the same stateroom, in a separate stateroom, etc. Since not everyone in the stateroom is "doomed" to come down with it, even though they would have been exposed, I assume they would take the symptomatic/positive person and quarantine them alone elsewhere, and then isolate and monitor the rest of the stateroom people in their stateroom [is some cleaning done in there too ?]. This fits with the finding of the study PHO summarized above: "When index patients were isolated while at home immediately after symptom onset until hospitalization, the secondary attack rate was zero, compared to a secondary attack rate of 18.3% when index patients were not immediately isolated while at home. "

SW

 

[WebmasterDoc]

Since this has turned into a thinly veiled political and media discussion it is closed.

No need to restart this topic.