Should you need further reason to curtail your relationship with rodents and their bodily fluids – or indeed with cruising – this week offered both.
One hundred and forty nine passengers and crew of the MV Hondius are waiting to be allowed to disembark at Tenerife on Sunday – an ignominious end to what was supposed to be a spectacular voyage on “one of the most environmentally friendly vessels on the polar seas”.
The expedition ship left Ushuaia in Argentina five weeks ago bound for Antarctica, the Falklands, South Georgia, Nightingale Island, Tristan, St Helena, Ascension, Cape Verde and eventually the Canary Islands. But by the time it reached Cape Verde, it had all gone tragically wrong. Three people died – a German national and a Dutch couple – and several others (eight at the time of writing) are sick with suspected or confirmed hantavirus, a deadly pathogen that typically spreads through direct contact with rodent saliva or droppings, or aerosolised faeces.
The nightmare for the passengers – two of whom are Irish – does not end when they go ashore. Since hantavirus plays a long game, festering in the body for weeks before symptoms appear, the passengers will be facing periods of quarantine or self-isolation. The UK government has said British nationals will be asked to isolate for 45 days.
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This is not another Covid, the World Health Organisation has assured the public, even as it looked increasingly likely that the cause was not hantavirus-ridden rats stowing away on the ship, but the more alarming spectre of person-to-person transmission. Hantavirus spreads through “close and prolonged contact”, the organisation stressed. (This reassurance was regarded as a minor blip by the rapidly-assembling hordes of hantavirus conspiracy theorists, who spent the week picking apart passengers’ social media posts for clues they are “crisis actors” in league with Bill Gates.) Despite the WHO’s confident assurances, the references to social distancing, mandatory masks and self-isolation seem to have precipitated their own outbreak of mild mass PTSD.
If the MV Hondius is not the beginning of another pandemic, it might prove the end of something else – the cruise holiday.
As the tabloids have regularly documented, with occasional glee, few forms of life embrace the cruising lifestyle with the same enthusiasm as the viral pathogen. A review of studies published between 1990 and 2013 found 127 reports of norovirus outbreaks on cruise ships. In many cases, the beloved all-inclusive buffet seems to be the culprit, but other factors contribute too: recycled air, crowded conditions, the on-board hot tub and – in one memorable case that is graphically reported in the literature should you have the stomach for it – the communal towel bin into which a sick passenger surreptitiously disposed of a soiled towel after a “faecal accident” in a public area.
Covid, legionnaires’ disease and the lesser known cyclosporiasis are partial to life on the high seas too. You may recall the Diamond Princess of March 2020, on which 712 passengers and crew were stricken by what was then referred to with almost touching innocence as the “novel” coronavirus. Other greatest hits include the Celebrity Mercury, beset by norovirus outbreaks in 2010, and the Explorer of the Seas which has the dubious record for one of the biggest mass vomiting events, when nearly 700 people got sick in 2014.
“The basic structure of cruise travel still creates the same challenge: many people sharing the same meals, the same air, the same water systems and the same common spaces,” observed Vikram Niranjan, assistant professor in Public Health at the University of Limerick, in a blog.
We’ve known for some time that cruises are basically floating petri-dishes of biohazards, but many people still seem willing to risk it. I suspect that’s because cruises also offer something lots of adults hanker after.
Cruise holidays occupy an antipodal position to a Ryanair flight on the holiday spectrum. Michael O’Leary’s stroke of dark genius was to appreciate that customers would put up with all sorts of depredations as long as the airline got them to their holiday destination quickly and cheaply. “Cheap” is, of course, relative.
A cruise offers more or less the opposite experience: you pay a whopping fee upfront, but after that, the basics are included – accommodation, food, entertainment. Instead of something to be endured, the time spent in transit is the whole point. It shouldn’t work, but it seems to, because the cruise holiday taps into something fundamental in human nature.
When children go on holidays, what they mostly want – and generally what we want for them – is freedom they can’t get at home. For many adults, the pull of a cruise is about the opposite: an escape from the tyranny of choice. You pay a lot of money for someone else to make all the big decisions for you. You get to choose between the 11 different varieties of carved meat at one of the ship’s eight different buffets, but that’s it. Everything else is decided for you: whether you’ll sit through an evening of karaoke or a magic show; which of the most obvious tourist sites in every destination you’ll get to make the most fleeting acquaintance with; even who your friends will be for the next two weeks. And increasingly now, too, which form of virus you have a decent chance of contracting.
Now that avoiding hantavirus is the frightening new addition to the cruise ship’s long list of on-board entertainment, will the cruise industry suffer? It might, if the risk of getting sick on board were not already well baked in by cruise aficionados. They’re unlikely to be deterred.
Spare a thought for the passengers on board the Caribbean Princess enjoying a 13-day cruise and currently somewhere around Nassau, over a hundred of whom are battling norovirus.
