Five Passengers Test positive for COVID-19 Aboard Jewel of the Seas – Cruise Law News

Five guests are positive for COVID-19 on Royal Caribbeans Jewel of the Seas, (according to a reliable crew member (who wishes to remain anonymous) on the cruise ship and is familiar with the testing of passengers and crew members.

The infected guests were moved to what the crew calls the red zone for isolation onboard the cruise ship.

These passengers were disembarked today in Cyprus.

The COVID-19 tests on the Jewel are performed by a company called Eurofins which conducts the Antigen and PCR tests onboard. The crew member explained that Eurofins usually performs tests on crew members on days 2 and 3 of the week-long cruise. Guests are usually tested near the end of the cruise.

Virtually all cruise ships today are experiencing either some number of crew members who test positive or a handful of passengers who turn out to have the virus, notwithstanding the fact that they are already vaccinated. Certain cruise lines are consistently refusing to disclose the number of infected passengers and crew members on their ships. A month ago, we published a short article titled Infected at Sea The New Normal on Cruise Ships? Of course, there is also an increasing number of super-spreader cruises taking place, that the cruise lines are trying to cover-up, like on the Carnival Vista last month and, more recently, on the MSC Virtuosa over the course of the last several weeks.

If these infections on the Jewel involve the highly contagious Delta variant, the R0 (pronounced R naught) (the mathematical term which indicates how contagious the infectious disease is) is as high as 7 or 8. Each person infected is likely to infect 7 or 8 others. The virus on the Diamond Princess, in contrast, had a R0 of only 2.

The Jewel of the Seas departed from Limassol, Cyprus a week ago on September 11th. The Royal Caribbean ship visited ports in Greece including Rhodes Island, Mykonos Island, Piraeus, and Santorini Island. The ship returned to Cyprus today.

Are you aware of a COVID-19 outbreak on a cruise ship? Let us hear from you in the comment section below or join the discussion on our Facebook page.

Image credit: Jewel of the Seas Top Dave Souza CC BY-SA 2.5, commons / wikimedia; bottom Royal Caribbean.

Here is the original post:

Five Passengers Test positive for COVID-19 Aboard Jewel of the Seas - Cruise Law News