This has to have hurt a lot of industry. No one is at the buffet.
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This has to have hurt a lot of industry. No one is at the buffet.
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It’s not meant to prevent spread on the boat so much as prevent spread from the boat. Also they didn’t limit the interpersonal interactions amongst the crew so that could easily be a vector to spread it all around the ship.
In this day and age, with what we know about how viruses spread through cruise ships like wildfire, Im surprised anyone got on board a cruiseship in Asia in January.
Plus the crew hasn't been quarantined from each other and some have gotten sick and they interact with the passengers, bringing them food and whatnot.
edit: like Bennymac said just before me.
The health section of Google News is 90% coronavirus stories now and has been for weeks. Christ it's gotten annoying and there's no end in sight.
I wonder if there was a factor where you couldn’t cancel your trip via travel insurance without a formal travel restriction or advisory from your home country. Like you yourself are not sick so you can’t get a medical exemption and the insurance companies don’t want to lose money so they say no refunds until formal restrictions are in place. Then people have an added financial incentive to continue with their travel plans and roll the dice.
I still wouldn’t have gotten on a cruise ship in Asia in January but everyone has different thresholds for risk (and some people don’t read the news)
Travel Guard has a thing you can pay extra for--cancel for any reason--but it only covers 50%.
Controlling this thing is tough--long incubation period, large numbers of asymptomatic carriers, high transmissibility by airborne, physical contact, virus on surfaces, occurring in densely populated areas--large cities, cruise ships. Compared to Ebola, for example, where transmission is by fluids, hazmat suits are protective, no healthy carriers running around and the sick can't do much running around, population is not often internationally mobile, except for the western volunteers, most outbreaks have been in relatively sparsely populated areas. Probably the closest thing is influenza which controls itself (usually). Hopefully this one will too.
You thinkin about an Asia cruise Goat? Strong move.
i'm out a K for canceling on a SE asia trip but I don't care
Fair enough. But you retired early in a town with a low cost of living and good skiing. I’m guessing a lot of cruisers are in a different boat (literally and figuratively) financially and perhaps this was something they saved up for over years.
And on top of that a lot of Americans and Canadians seem to travel without any insurance (including travel health insurance) - let alone paying for fancy plans with no questions asked non-medical cancellation policies.
They should have done what you did and canceled and eaten the cost.
I did a loop through 4 Asian cities in January that all had positive cases. I did my homework and knew the risks and had full insurance. And I took plenty of precautions. If I got it I would have only myself to blame for choosing to follow through with my plans.
I would have chosen differently if the plan was to get on a giant floating Petri dish in the midst of a regional pandemic.
That's my point. Price probably well under $1B for wu flu insurance today. Get a bunch of expert teams and safety equipment ready to go anywhere on Earth. Make quarantine pleasant so people are more likely to go. Pay countries to protect health. No way cruise ships should have been rejected from multiple ports. USA is asleep on this (and other countries).
One here! Can't see a better use for my taxes and government at the moment.
Yeah I had my own self imposed “quarantine” when I got home.
The cities I went to in Asia had positive cases but amongst millions of people so the numbers were tiny.
Took reasonable precautions on the trip and scheduled the departure home before things could get too out of control in those cities.
Populations in those cities were over 10 million. Number of positive cases were in the low single digits. That is not reasonably comparable to a cruise ship at sea in my opinion.
You wouldn't likely leave a city of millions if 5 people had norovirus.
I wouldn’t set sail on a cruise ship if I knew that 1 passenger was boarding with confirmed norovirus (or coronavirus for that matter)
Lots of evidence out there about how quickly shit spreads through a cruise ship. 5 cases of something in a city of 15 million is a different story.
Ripz is the resident right wing conspiracy theorist. I Have a feeling he spends most of his time going down these kinds of rabbit holes
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Was listening to an interview with a guy who decided to stay on his ship when they started evacuating people to stateside quarantine. He gave all sorts of bullshit reasons. I'm thinking--booze for quarantined passengers on ship. Yes. Booze for quarantined people on AF base-No. Easy call.
Age of Coronavirus Deaths
Based on all 72,314 cases of COVID-19 confirmed, suspected, and asymptomatic cases in China as of February 11, a paper by the Chinese CCDC released on February 17 and published in the Chinese Journal of Epidemiology [1] has found that the risk of death increases the older you are, as follows:[
COVID-19 Fatality Rate by AGE:
DEATH RATE 80+ years old 14.8% 70-79 years old 8.0% 60-69 years old 3.6% 50-59 years old 1.3% 40-49 years old 0.4% 30-39 years old 0.2% 20-29 years old 0.2% 10-19 years old 0.2%0-9 years old no fatalities
^The risk of death naturally goes up the older you are. The virus just pushes things along faster.
50% of Chinese men smoke. 2% of Chinese women.
in Bali I mentioned to our cab driver that it looked like all the men smoked but none of the women and his rather simplistic answer was " Only prostitutes smoke "
Half of all Chinese men are smoking 2% of the women? Damn! And I though the Japs were freaks.
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Right now flying into hong kong would be like boot packing up a wind loaded Aviy slope into a major storm as dusk approaches with the temperature dropping, so are the odds of living thru significantly BOW if you didnt go ?
I don't know about Americans but most Canadians buy travel insurance myself included cuz it isnt really expensive and we have heard all those horror stories about HC in America but this isnt about getting sick its about the odds of dieing
actualy i think a lot of cruisers are repeat offending boomers, also I think there are a lot of boomers out there with LOTS of money to spend on cruising,
The Defined benifits pension is THE biggest thing about retirement, some Boomers have it , money just keeps appearing in the account, half the time I'm not sure what to do with it
so leaving a K on the table doesn't really mean anything but if you die they stop sending $$$$ and that would mean something
Good points. We adjusted our plans mid trip to not spend anytime in Hong Kong and that was still relatively early in the outbreak. We’d already paid for accommodations that were not refundable - no regrets absorbing those costs.
As I said before these cruisers should have done what you did and left the money on the table - even if their travel insurance wouldn’t cover a non medical trip cancellation (which I suspect most plans wouldn’t cover? Otherwise you could just book trips and cancel last minute all the time and the insurance companies would have to pay you back)
How many of those cruiser boomers crying out for tax payer funded million dollar evacuation plans from their plush prison cell are also the types to criticize “health care for all” plans? No way my neighbor is gonna get diabetes treatment on my dime! Make better choices I say! But somebody send me a plane - who knew this was a bad idea! Who can I sue for this situation?
Watch for the class action suits against the cruise lines this spring.
If i google Universal I get hits for theme parks and movie theatres hmmm
so once tried to explain Universal HC to an american and he thot it was great except he didnt wana pay for that fat guy ... I gave up,
but fuck ya Americans ain't gona take care of Americans, they can can all just fuck off and die somehwere hopefully before they get pissed off desperate and shoot someone
So for a 3 week vaca anywhere in the world I am gona spend 4-5K
While I may have left 1 K on the table OTOH I kept the other 3-4K
It would be interesting to find out what those higher risk group percentages would be without any medical intervention.
Also, im curious if the death total is higher than reported due to the fact that a fraction of the individuals needing med help are able to receive it in Wuhan. Like people dead in their apartments not yet counted. Time will tell.
If you are old Chinese and get flu your death will be noted as the secondary affect; Pneumonia or heart attack. Not sure how the USA does it.
there isn't a lot of active medical intervention--oxygen, fluids, if things go south artificial ventilation but in the high risk groups once things get to that point mortality is very high. There is not proven effective antiviral drug treatment. So the mortality in the high risk groups would likely be similar with or without medical treatment. While the article says the denominator includes suspected and asymptomatic cases, it is quite possible that the number of asymptomatic cases is much higher, making the death rate much lower.
In a surveillance state like China I doubt there are a lot of people lying around dead not being counted.
I have a yearly travel insurance plan that covers just about every contingency including hospital stays, medical evacuations, evacuations from war zones via armed security forces and little things like trip delays and lost luggage.
I've used it a few times over the years and won't travel without it. Bag lost when attending a conference in Bali? No prob, I can go buy new stuff and they cover the costs while having a concierge call/email me every couple hours about the status of my bag while simultaneously hounding the airline to get it to me (exact same thing happened to me in Barcelona another year).
Puking my brains out and unable to keep down water while in Sydney? I call a hotline and an hour later a doc shows up to my hotel with Rx meds. Did the same thing in Amsterdam, except they called ahead to a clinic a block from my hotel.
GF unable to keep down fluids while in Lima? Less than an hour later a Mercedes shows up and whisked us away to an expat hospital where an English speaking doctor was waiting for us.
Connecting flight in Tokyo cancelled because weather? Cool, I'll expense a 5 star hotel to the insurance company and have a per diem for food in addition to the one my company provides.
I dont think there has been a year in 5+ years of having the policy that it hasn't paid for itself and then some.
It's nice not to ever have to worry about dealing with third world medical systems or a medical evac that can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the convenience factor for smoothing out normal travel BS makes it worth it by itself.
Yes this plan sounds amazing please let us know where you got it from.
But could you cancel a whole trip (or cruise) just on a whim and claim it? Or in this case claim trip cancellation because you didn’t want to risk getting covid or something like that? Like you don’t have a medical illness but you just don’t want to go.
I guess you could always ask a doctor to write you a letter saying they dont recommend you travel to this area but in what pretense - the travel insurance company could request a diagnosis to support that or even medical records.
No, you definitely cannot cancel a trip for no reason. You need to have some documentation that you or an immediate family member is sick/dying/dead to get reimbursed for a cancelled trip.
I believe in order to cancel for no reason you'd need a single trip policy and not a year long policy.
Right makes sense. Which leads me back to my earlier speculation that some of these cruisers may have continued with their bought and paid for trip because they couldnt cancel without losing that money - and they just crossed their fingers that the boat didn’t turn into a virus factory.