Passenger on FIRST Caribbean cruise since March tests positive for COVID-19

The first cruise ship to set sail in the Caribbean since the pandemic began in March reported a case of the coronavirus on board just five days after its voyage began.

A passenger aboard the SeaDream Yacht Club’s SeaDream I tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday while the ship was anchored off Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, travel writer Gene Sloan reported.

Sloan, one of 53 passengers aboard the Norwegian cruise ship that departed Barbados on Saturday, documented the seven-day trip on travel blog The Points Guy.

All passengers were forced to quarantine in their cabins after the ship’s captain, Torbjorn Lund, informed them of the case around noon, Sloan said.

During the early days of the pandemic, cruise ships were seen as floating petri dishes and had become the source of major outbreaks at sea earlier this year.

The health scare comes amid what Sloan described as a “ watershed moment ” for the cruise industry, which had been hit hard after being forced to suspend operations due to epidemics.

Captain Lund said the infected passenger had tested positive on a “ preliminary ” basis, but said he felt ill before taking the test.

As a result, the ship was operating under the assumption that it had more infected passengers on board and would immediately return to its point of departure in Bridgetown.

Meanwhile, the remaining passengers and 66 crew members underwent tests, all of which came back negative on Wednesday evening, Sloan said.

Passengers and crew members are expected to be retested by health authorities upon their return to the island.

The SeaDream I cruise was the first of 22 planned crossings by the cruise line in the Caribbean until the spring and was scheduled to make stops in the islands of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada.

None of the passengers visited an island town during the layovers or came into contact with islanders, Sloane said.

All travelers were also required to undergo a COVID-19 testing “ glove ” for the trip which involved three separate tests.

They had to produce negative results in a test carried out several days before boarding, on the day of departure and three days after departure.

The strict testing system was aimed at creating a ‘COVID-free bubble’ on the ship to ensure that the chances of an outbreak were extremely low.

For this reason, passengers were initially not required to wear masks on board.

However, those rules were later overruled by the ship’s operations manager on Monday evening, Sloan said.

The ship had also kept social distancing guidelines in place at its pools, bars and lounge on deck.

Restrictions aside, Sloan in a previous blog post described the experience as “surprisingly normal”.

Of the 53 passengers, 37 are Americans and the remaining 16 are from the UK, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany.

The potential outbreak would mark another blow to the cruise ship industry, which has been among the hardest hit after several coronavirus outbreaks were reported on multiple liners earlier this year, some of which were required to keep their passengers quarantined on board for weeks.

Perhaps the most famous case is the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined in Japan from February 5 to 19.

A sick passenger ultimately resulted in nearly 700 infections and seven deaths from COVID-19.

The rapid spread of the virus prompted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to impose a ship ban order on U.S. cruises in mid-March for 30 days.

The ban was finally lifted late last month, with the agency issuing new guidelines to help businesses resume operations in the coming months.

That didn’t mean the CDC was allowing cruises to resume in the United States as the country faced a third wave of infections.

Rather, it would serve as a framework that will allow the cruise industry to restart operations in stages with the implementation of security measures.