Thanks to Bob Spears for the photo of Norwegian Bliss as it headed out on this year’s first Seattle-to-Alaska cruise this afternoon. As previewed here Thursday, this is the first of 298 expected cruise-ship calls at Seattle’s three berths (two in Magnolia, one downtown) between now and mid-October. According to the season schedule, the second one is Monday, when Carnival Spirit sails from Pier 91. It carries up to 2,100+ passengers, about half the capacity of Norwegian Bliss.
Those cruise ships are full of thousands of people who buy from our businesses, leave millions of sales tax dollars, and then go home. How wonderful!
And also visit our local hospitals, now that the feds have laid off all the CDC’s cruise ship inspectors and the epidemiologist in charge of overseeing cruise ship outbreaks. A move that saved taxpayers zero dollars, since those positions were funded by the cruise lines, no less…
k, it’s hard to keep track of all the cruises that have had massive Norovirus outbreaks over recent years, so whatever the CDC was doing wasn’t working.
I’ll take the counter viewpoint that whatever the CDC was doing *was* working. Realize that the norovirus is highly contagious, can persist weeks on surfaces, unfazed by antibiotics, etc., extremely difficult to eradicate and control. At least they had outbreak responses and data reporting. Less information now doesn’t help the situation.
https://www.cdc.gov/norovirus/php/reporting/outbreak-responding.html
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