More than a dozen passengers and crew members on a Princess Cruises ship in California have been diagnosed with COVID-19. Having arrived in San Francisco on Sunday, the ship carrying the diseased passengers will set sail once more on Monday afternoon.
During a 15-day Panama Canal tour, passengers on the Ruby Princess became infected with the virus. According to Princess Cruises, all passengers and crew members were up to date on their immunizations before sailing.
As far as the ship’s management is aware, those who tested positive for coronavirus did not spread it to others.
“We isolated and quarantined them and monitored and cared for them while our onboard medical team was on board,” Princess Cruise said in a statement.
Princess Cruise has stated that some of the passengers who contracted the virus while onboard the cruise did not complete their quarantine. According to the firm, those affected were either transported back to their homes or “were given accommodations onshore to hotels organized in advance for isolation and quarantine.”
Second time this year that the Ruby Princess has docked in California with COVID-positive guests on board. Random testing while docked in San Francisco in January found the virus in 12 guests returning from a 10-day Mexico cruise, CBS station KPIX reported.
As of Sunday, Princess Cruises had not made public the number of guests aboard the ship that had contracted COVID-19. However, the existence of COVID-19 cases on the cruise shows that Americans aren’t yet out of the woods when it comes to coronavirus infections.
Arkansas, Connecticut, and New York have seen an upsurge in cases of the virus’s new BA.2 sub-variant. It appears that BA.2 is 30 percent more transmissible than Omicron, although the disease does not appear to be more severe.
Even as the number of people infected with BA.2 increases, daily incidence, and hospitalizations in the United States are declining.
The early days of the pandemic saw ships carrying infected passengers prevented from landing in California and Florida because of COVID-19 outbreaks, which put cruise operators under tremendous pressure. Twenty-one passengers and crew members on Princess Cruises’ Grand Princess fell ill with the virus, and the ship was quarantined for six days at sea.
The number of people who booked cruises dropped precipitously over the last two years as the CDC warned against cruises for everybody, regardless of vaccination status.
According to industry figures, cruise companies are expected to lose $63 billion and cut thousands of jobs in 2020 and 2021. By next year, the cruise industry is likely to be fully recovered, according to the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA).
