Amid the news that cruise ships are returning, many with vaccination requirements for guests, we’re hearing that it’s not going smoothly. Two passengers on an allegedly fully vaccinated Celebrity cruise ship, the Millenium, have tested positive for COVID-19. They’re asymptomatic and are being isolated and monitored.
The cruise ship, operated by Royal Caribbean Group, departed from St. Maarten on June 5 for a seven-night Caribbean sail.
“Today two guests sharing a stateroom onboard Celebrity Millennium tested positive for COVID-19 while conducting the required end of cruise testing,” the cruise line said in a statement. “The individuals are asymptomatic and currently in isolation and being monitored by our medical team.”
The cruise line added, “We are conducting contact tracing, expediting testing for all close contacts and closely monitoring the situation.”
Per Celebrity Millennium’s COVID-19 health and safety policy, “All guests 16 years and older must be fully vaccinated with all COVID-19 vaccine doses administered at least 14 days prior to sailing. As of August 1, 2021, all guests age 12 and older must be fully vaccinated.”
The cruise line previously outlined the different checkpoints guests had to go through to be able to set sail.
“Celebrity Millennium is sailing with fully vaccinated crew and guests and following comprehensive protocols that align with our destination partners and exceed CDC guidelines to protect the health and safety of our guests,” the company said.
Celebrity continued, “All guests on Celebrity Millennium were required to show proof of vaccination as well as a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours before sailing from St. Maarten this past Saturday.”
There’s a window of several days when someone can test negative for coronavirus and still have it. I have no desire to go on another cruise after getting norovirus on a cruise ship with my family years ago. My parents and brother are not meat eaters and thankfully I was the only one to catch it, presumably from a burger I ate. It was a miserable experience and brought home how easily things spread on a cruise ship. Plus, remember the poor people stranded on ships without power and running water a few years ago? Shame on those Republican governors who finally decided to try to regulate private businesses by fining them for having mask and vaccination requirements. Even when those are in place, it’s not a foolproof system and people can still contract the virus as this story shows. Hopefully these guests are fine and this will help other cruise ships realize that they can’t mess around with unvaccinated passengers.
What’s up with this post on January 24th?
I cannot understand why folks are on a rush to go on cruises. Is an all you can eat/drink (alcohol) buffet worth it?
it’s the great traveling for lazy people
That’s an oversimplification. As someone who has done many cruises and land travel the fact that it affords you the ability to touch several countries in one trip is very good. And before we bring up the European travel of trains and planes consider that you don’t have to deal with all the visa req etc, the cruise takes care of that. I wouldn’t have made it to Cuba without a cruise.
Also traveling with kids sucks. Fact. Cruises allow you to have built in activities AND occasional child care.
Also the built in activities for adults.
Yes buffet, but most Cruises now also offer fine dining. All inclusive is a way of travel that makes it affordable to most people to not have to be nickel and dimed at every meal.
So, while I agree that it’s stupid to be cruising now (and yell my clients as such) please do not denigrate the cruising crowd. For the most part they are smart and money conscious and just want to relax
I like cruising too. We’ve done Alaska a few times, it really is the best way to see a lot of Alaska in a smaller amount of time. We also did a few river cruises in Europe. But no way would I even think about a cruise in the foreseeable future, plus, I’m retiring to paradise, so why bother anymore?
Cruises also make a lot more sense in the context of how very little time off American workers get. Having everything covered and not needing to put in a lot of planning also feels like a plus in that regard.
When I travel I want to get to know the country and city I am staying in. Cruises herd Americans together and then make them eat all their meals on board. They barely get a feeling for the places they are visiting. Some of the most depressing sights I’ve seen in Europe was some enormous cruise ship sitting in the Lisbon and Venice harbors looking so out of place and environmentally problematic.
@ Anne Call
Oh God, yes, nothing more depressing that these cruise ships in Venice…
To each his/her own, I couldn’t do it. I don’t want to be around that many people.
It’s a personal choice that I realize a lot of people are making, but I’m just not in the vacation/cruise/fly mindset yet. I’m grateful that my work has been understanding of this and the earliest I’ll probably need to fly is January, because I have no plans to personally travel anywhere just yet. Too many variants, too much of the world still unvaccinated, and we’ll likely be needing boosters sooner rather than later. It just doesn’t feel like the right time.
This is so scary. I don’t have a great understanding of the science and I’m so confused about how this happened.
It’s likely that this couple had the virus before they got on the ship (since breakthrough cases do happen, often asymptomatically) and they either got a false negative on their pre-boarding test or didn’t take the test in the right window from the point of exposure — tests only work if you take it 5-7 days after first being exposed.
I’m not great with the science either but I do believe it’s extremely unlikely for vaccinated people to pass it on to other vaccinated people, because the vaccine lowers transmission.
Was this a cruise to nowhere, or did they stop at ports? I can’t tell from this excerpt (or i’m just missing it.) If the latter, then maybe they caught it there?
It is just as likely that they lied about being vaccinated. Airlines have been inundated with fake vaccination cards.
What Mich said.
@ Mich
Airports have also dealt with a lot of fake Covid negative test results. People are f*cking a$$holes.
The chance of both people having a breakthrough infections is rare. My suspicion is that they are not vaccinated. Sure, if it’s a ship with hundreds of people, 2 unrelated strangers on the ship might separately have breakthrough infections, but 2 people sharing the same cabin, who know each other, no way.
I thought exactly the same thing as soon as they said it was two people sharing a cabin. I do not think they were actually vaccinated. This is my issue: people are terrible, and they will lie
Not that I’m heading out on a cruise or anything, just concerned.
We were hoping to go this year for our 30th anniversary but nope! I was thinking 2022 but even then is iffy with all of these new variants emerging.
Cruises have always seemed like a nightmare vacation to me, being trapped on a large floating Las Vegas/Disneyland monstrosity and a cesspit of germs (I went to Vegas once and hated it). I remain fully secure in my disdain that they are a waste of time and money (not to mention horrible for the environment) and I can’t imagine why people would ever want to go on them. I was not convinced before COVID but was kind of “Ok, well maybe?” but now I know I will never ever book a vacation on one.
I’ve never thought cruises would be a vacation for me, like you, feeling trapped. Still don’t. So many people enjoy them, just not my thing. I do like Vegas for short trips but hotel-it away from the strip, Mandalay Bay, and Uber to the crowds anytime. I quit Disney after the kids were young and even then it was relatively short trips. COVID means never ever for certain.
I am the same way, and I can’t stand Vegas either. I have to go for business in October, but business is the only way I go there. And I don’t cruise.
Floating cafeteria of germs – barf
DeSantis is pushing these no proof of vax cruises – he’s going to find the cruise industry moving to ports other than FL if he starts fining them. The State will lose millions if that happens and it will be the service industry who suffers for this b.s.
Abbot the Idiot signed it into law last week here. He is also going after the cruise ship industry. One liner was going to open a port in Galveston, but they have nixed it since they require all of their passengers to be vaccinated. So it is already hurting the tourism in Texas.
So they tested positive at the end of the cruise? So they might have caught it on the cruise from someone else, or came on the cruise already infected and potentially have spread it to other passengers? And this is on a fully vaccinated cruise?
Yeah, I love cruises, especially with kids, but I’m holding off on them for a while….
What Midge said.
Vaccinations failed for BOTH of them? They forged their records. Wonder how many others did that.
It’s odd that the couple were both vaccinated yet both tested positive. BOTH had breakthrough infections (which are pretty rare) ??? That is odd to say the least. I wonder how does the cruise ship verify if you’ve been fully vaccinated? Can people get fake vaccination records? I mean I guess it can happen but it’s odd this couple BOTH didn’t produce anti-bodies. I wonder what vaccine they got and if they both got it at the same time from the same place? I have heard of a few instances where people were given saline solution by mistake instead of the vaccine. Who knows.
Or the virus likely stumbled upon someone who had had the vaccine just before the cruise and they didn’t have antibodies yet (it takes 3 weeks at least from injection to build them up)
Don’t they require you be fully vaccinated to go on the cruise? You’re not fully vaccinated until at least two/three weeks after your second does. I assumed they wouldn’t allow anyone on the cruise who had been vaccinated but hadn’t waited the two/three weeks?
My husband and I went on our first ever cruise right before everyone realized how serious the situation was and everything got locked down. I feel like we really dodged a bullet, especially considering that I was pregnant at the time. I really don’t get why people love cruises so much (my husband and I decided that we aren’t cruise people), so I really don’t think it’s worth risking your health over.
My only reason for traveling at the moment would be so family could meet our baby, but considering a lot of our extended family are in Japan or Poland, that’s not going to be happening anytime soon. I’m not about to take him on an international flight even if he supposedly has some level of protection because I’m fully vaccinated and am still nursing him.
I love cruises – you travel while you sleep, so it seems so efficient to me. We were supposed to cruise around Italy last year for our anniversary, and I was hoping to make it up next year. I’m not holding my breath.
One of the TikTok creators I follow is a Captain of one of these Celebrity cruise ships. She is currently in day 12 of her company mandated precautionary quarantine before she takes over the ship to start working after being at home for a few months. Which is onboard the ship, confined to an amazing room, so not a terrible gig whatsoever and of course great advertising for her company.
I do feel really badly that all the precautions these cruise crew members take will be all for naught if this continues.
Honor system? Nope. People will lie to go on vacation.
I thought norovirus was spread person to person, not a foodbourne illness?
I used to work at the cruise ship terminal. Every day we had anywhere from 1-10? Or more? of what they called “special passengers.” Aka. People with norovirus. They were separated from the rest of the passengers and sent down an isolated hallway to be cleared privately with an agent. Once I got puked on. That alone was enough for me to never want to go on a cruise personally.
Norovirus is shed in stool and vomit of infected persons (sorry I know it’s gross) so if the infected person touches or prepares food for others with unclean hands , voila, it is now foodborne. That’s how many outbreaks occur in restaurants, etc and why food workers who have GI symptoms are supposed to be excluded from work.
Correct
Celebitchy’s family was lucky not to get it, but it wasn’t because they didn’t eat meat. That same food handler could have touched anything plant based and infected them too.
From the CDC website on ways to get infected with norovirus:
“eat food or drink liquids that are contaminated with norovirus,
“touch surfaces or objects contaminated with norovirus and then put your fingers in your mouth, or
“have direct contact with someone who is infected with norovirus, such as by caring for them or sharing food or eating utensils with them.
“Norovirus can easily contaminate food and water because it only takes a very small amount of virus particles to make you sick. Food and water can get contaminated with norovirus in many ways… ”
So yes you can absolutely get it from food/drink and you definitely don’t want anyone who has it to puke on you! Check the CDC website for more (admittedly kind of gross) details about how it spreads.
Also, alcohol-based hand sanitizer is not very effective against norovirus so thorough washing of hands is important.
From CDC website, it looks like it can spread both from person to person and through contaminated food or water, so… double the fun. (https://www.cdc.gov/norovirus/index.html)
I’ve got a Caribbean cruise scheduled for late November, but we’ll see if it happens. They are fun and great for families with mixed physical mobility levels. However if things are looking dicey we’ll cancel it. I’m pretty desperate to travel so I hope things work out!
This is not a breakthrough or non vaccinated situation. This is the vaccine working! They only got tested bc it was required, no one is sick, neither of them have symptoms. They didn’t spread it around the ship. They probably had some Covid enter their system and their bodies fought it off with no Issues. This is what the vaccine is supposed to do! If they hadn’t been tested, they would never have even known. One of the doctors I follow says PCR test are too sensitive for vaccinated people, we need to take an antigen test instead. PCR tests are designed to detect teeny levels of the virus in our systems. We can’t expect Covid to be completely eradicated right now, the vaccines help reduce the amount out there but their main job is to make sure if we do get some in our body, our system doesn’t let it take hold. Your vaccine is super working if that happens and your don’t even get a sniffle!
A few years ago I had some other health problems and my doctor tested me for the flu. I tested positive for both flu A and flu B but never had a single symptom. His comment to me was thankfully I’d had the flu shot and my body fought those flus off immediately. That’s what the vaccines do, they prevent it from taking hold in your body.
I didn’t see where you read the virus didn’t spread. It may well have. And showing proof of vaccinations can be as simple as checking a box.