Originally Posted by
jmastron
So it looks like Seadream was very successful in their "Ruby Princess" plan -- quickly get the potentially infected passengers off the ship and scattered onto planes to home where contact tracing would be minimal to none. 2 crew tested positive as/after the passengers were departing, anyone thing it's really likely that *zero* additional passengers were infected? I can't find any more recent information -- if there was followup with all of the passengers and all had been negative a few days after returning home *that* would have been reported by the cruise line, so it's telling that there was no further reporting.
I believe three of the four press people tweeted they'd tested negative again upon arriving home and quarantining a few days. Three of them were from UK
and were required to self isolate when they returned (though I will note that two acted like they opted to self isolate "to be safe" when it is a clear gov't mandate*).
The lack of data in such a situation isn't a data point for "0 positive cases", either. Some theme parks in a state with questionable public facing metrics have previously cited that no cases can be traced to their business or other similar businesses citing those stats in hopes of reopening. Some people think the CDC puts unfair coverage on cruises but I'd also say given the metrics they do have, it is too bad they didn't have more data on other modes of transportation, airports, and large tourism attractions. Also wishful thinking that these businesses could have lobbied to get actual measures to push down cases and transmission to help address the problem. Other cruise lines likely took deep interest in this cruise and letting SeaDream be the PR guinea pig.
The Healthy Sail Panel does include some post-mortems and policy revisions but I didn't see further contact tracing for disembarked "healthy" passengers. A lot of it presumes they could have sufficient isolation and contact tracing onboard or ports would accept a COVID-19 positive passenger in critical condition. CDC's Framework for Conditional Sailing
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices...us-cruise-ship does require initial sailings to test the crew. " The initial phase requires crew screening to determine the prevalence of COVID-19 among all crew members currently on cruise ships in U.S. waters." so it could be possible for them to require those numbers to continue to be reported to CDC for some time.
* Barbados is on England's current travel corridor list where they would not need to self isolate
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavi...avel-corridors but a cruise ship with covid positives isn't the same as 14 land days in Barbados.