CDC says don’t cruise due to Omicron

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On New Year’s Eve, hundreds of thousands of people crowded together in stadiums to watch football games, as they have all season. They yelled, they chanted, and they were inches from each other.

But the day before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Americans to postpone cruise ship travel in 2022, due to the spread of the omicron variant of Covid-19. The most vaccinated and tested people in the world — American cruise travelers — are being told to stay away.

The latest version of CDC advice singling out the cruise industry says that even fully vaccinated passengers can catch and spread the newest version of Covid.

The CDC raised the risk level for cruise travel to its highest level. Previously, the agency said only unvaccinated people should avoid cruises.

The new CDC advisory says:

  • Avoid cruise travel, regardless of vaccination status.
  • Even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants.
  • The virus that causes COVID-19 spreads easily between people in close quarters on board ships, and the chance of getting COVID-19 on cruise ships is very high, even if you are fully vaccinated and have received a COVID-19 vaccine booster dose.
  • Outbreaks of COVID-19 have been reported on cruise ships.
  • If you travel on a cruise ship, make sure you are fully vaccinated before travel and get a COVID-19 vaccine booster dose if you are eligible.
  • People who go on a cruise should get tested 1–3 days before their trip and 3–5 days after their trip, regardless of vaccination status or symptoms.
  • Along with testing, passengers who are not fully vaccinated should self-quarantine for a full 5 days after cruise travel.  
  • People on cruise ships should wear a mask to keep their nose and mouth covered when in shared spaces. While CDC is exercising its enforcement discretion under CDC’s Mask Order to not require that persons wear a mask under certain circumstances on board foreign-flagged cruise ships subject to the Temporary Extension & Modification of the Framework for Conditional Sailing Order (CSO), including onboard cruise ships choosing to follow the requirements of the CSO on a voluntary basis, individual cruise lines may require travelers (passengers and crew) to wear masks on board the ship.

Cruise ships already have rules that say all people onboard must be vaccinated and tested before they board.

The 2022 Alaska cruise season officially begins on Saturday, April 23, 2022, according to Cruise Critic, when Regent’s Seven Seas Mariner makes a call on remote Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands. On April 25, the Norwegian Bliss arrives in Juneau.

There’s no word yet from the major cruise lines as to whether they will cancel, as they did for the entire 2020 season. But likely not.

Bookings for Alaska begin in early January, so the news casts uncertainty for businesses across Alaska, which have suffered greatly from pandemic policies over the past two years. The 2021 cruise season was limited in Alaska, but considered successful because there were no great Covid outbreaks.

For 2022, one of the biggest challenges for Alaska businesses is going to be labor — tour guides, coach drivers, and small boat captains, for instance. Businesses will have to pay a lot more for those workers, and they may have fewer customers to support the businesses, so prices will be driven higher for tours. But if the cruise ships are booking people at cheaper cruise prices, those types of passengers won’t go on shore excursions in the numbers needed to support a business.

In Juneau, companies are so desperate for workers that $1,000 signing bonuses are being offered to seasonal bus drivers.

“A lot of tour operators decided not to open this season, mostly because they couldn’t get staff,” Skagway Borough mayor Andrew Cremata told Cruise Critic in September. “I think one of the biggest challenges for business owners next year is going to be getting people to come up here and work. The price of the tours is going to go up. The cost of doing business is going to go up. If you can work at McDonalds in Seattle for fifteen bucks an hour, and someone is telling you, ‘Hey, come work in Alaska, live in dorm-style housing for $12 an hour’…it’s a tough sell.”

42 COMMENTS

  1. Another potential blow to Alaska’s fragile economy.
    Bigger question: was last year’s maritime waver extended to this year? Canada has gone full Soviet Bloc and ruthlessly controls what and who come in and out. Canada could sink the season faster than Covid

  2. The CDC should be told by every cruise line to “go pound sand”. The Omicron variant is like a cold and the CDC is again throwing its weight around because we are allowing it. I will make the decision for my health, thank you very much! The Fauci ouchi is not on my list if things to do either. What a bunch of hoohaa this whole thing has been, but it has made, big pharma, its government members(bought and paid for), the CDC, the FDA, the schoolboards, the FBI, some demo mayors, governors, etc. very rich and very happy! We, the common citizens, are paying for it through the nose. It’s time we wake up and fight back with our money, our feet, our votes and our voices!!!

    • Well, this “hoohaa” killed my friend after an agonizing month on a ventilator. It’s done the same for almost 800,000 other Americans. I guess your luck is still holding.

      I’m uncertain which is greater – your ignorance, or your arrogance.

      • Whidbey, again, the obsessive, neurotic and psychotic focus on one single virus by all you Branch Covidian cultists is the very height of irrationality and mass insanity. For every person who has (supposedly) died from (or with?) the Wuhan Virus, I can give you heartwrenching examples of dozens of others who have died from any number of other causes, many of them preventable as well. But where is your concern and hysteria over all those vastly greater number of deaths? Where is the intellectual capacity to examine the disease in a proper context and perspective? Lost, completely gone in your mass formation psychosis..
        .
        I also know a person (knew a person), well, several actually, who died from/with the Wuhan Virus. But you know what? Those deaths do not affect my judgement one iota that this virus has been wildly and inappropriately responded to by officials, and whipped up into an irrational hysteria by the corporate media, all to further a freedom-crushing political agenda of tracking and control.

        • Speaking of mass formation psychosis:
          “If a large segment of people are willing to follow this strategy to deal with this object of anxiety no matter the cost, then in a second step people start a collective & heroic battle with this Object of Anxiety and in that way a new kind of social bond emerges & with that a new kind of “sense making” or purpose. Suddenly life is all directed towards battling this Object of Anxiety. This creates new sense of connectedness with others in the Mass-Formation.
          .
          This sudden and radical switch from the negative state of lack of social-connection to the opposite, a massive increase in social connection leads up to a mental intoxication.
          .
          When people experience this mental intoxication it no longer matters if the narrative is wrong or even blatantly false. What matters is that it leads up to this mental intoxication. This is why they will continue to go along with the narrative.
          .
          The resistance to understanding the narrative is false or wrong is driven by the fear of returning to the state of Free-Floating Anxiety and wanting to continue to experience the mental intoxication.
          .
          This explains why arguing based on facts will not work. Facts no longer matter to them. Given the facts, they are be unable to come to sensible conclusions, even in their own best interests.”

          • And your supposed point in this latest expulsion of verbal diarrhea would be what, exactly, Oh Disingenuous One?
            .
            Actually, I do recognize the putative point behind your logorrheic diatribe — you are trying to shift the focus, and the blame, of the neurosis and psychosis inherent in the Covidian Cultists such as yourself onto those who can see it and who oppose it. Not only is that dishonest, and typically for you, disingenuous, but it is merely an overly loquacious way of saying, in the best puerile fashion, “I know you are, but what am I?”

          • Jeff,
            The point is you are exhibiting textbook signs of being under the influence of mass formation psychosis. You do not listen to reason or facts, you attack anyone who dares question the narrative, you even post covid nonsense on article that have nothing at all to do with covid.
            .
            In the words of the good doctor Robert Malone, “When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in the sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.
            .
            And one of the aspects of that phenomenon is the people they identify as their leaders, who come in and recognize their pain and say “I alone can fix this for you,” they will follow that person through hell…
            .
            Anybody who questions that narrative is immediately attacked. This is what has happened. We have all those conditions.”

          • Steve, once again, you are merely trying (very badly) to accuse others of that which and your Covidian bedfellows are guilty.
            How cheap, how pathetic, how typically disingenuous, how Steve-O.

          • Jeff,
            Your words are splashed all over these articles, they all show textbook signs of you being under the influence of mass formation psychosis…including your latest response, textbook.

          • Steve, your consistently and purposefully antagonistic, and knowingly false, comments here prove that you are the real troll here. Nobody else here has accused me of such, yet multiple other posters have repeatedly recognized and commented on your own trollish behavior and pattern here.
            .
            And again, your ridiculous and feeble attempt to brand me with the sin of which you and your Covidian Cult are guilty is laughable and pathetically shallow. Nobody is buying it, Steve, least of all you.

          • Textbook.
            .
            Are you literally reading how someone suffering from mass formation psychosis would behave and then behaving that way on purpose?

          • “The resistance to understanding the narrative is false or wrong is driven by the fear of returning to the state of Free-Floating Anxiety and wanting to continue to experience the mental intoxication.
            .
            This explains why arguing based on facts will not work. Facts no longer matter to them. Given the facts, they are be unable to come to sensible conclusions, even in their own best interests.”
            .
            This explains your behavior to a T. I get it Jeff, you are scared. This covid is just like a bad cold or flu right? Why are you so obsessed about a bad cold or flu?

          • And speaking of being obsessed with the Wuhan Virus, Steve, why is it that you almost always, and almost only, post in any and ALL MRAK threads touching on it? Why does any mention of the Wuhan Virus, much less questioning the official narratives (and censorship, lies and misinformation) surrounding it invariably draw you like a moth to a flame? Eh? Why is that, Steve?

          • Jeff,
            Seems like that must just be an observational bias on your part, there are certainly a lot of covid articles since we are still in a pandemic and it is the leading news of the day. You post on every covid article, you post covid related nonsense on articles not related to covid, you are very obviously and completely obsessed with covid. Yet another sign of being afflicted with mass formation psychosis.

        • Of course facts don’t affect your judgment. It’s all based on rhetoric and political loyalty to the Orange messiah.

      • Ordinarily I ignore you. You like to burn straw men and troll. But in this case, I’ll bite.
        More people die from car accidents than Covid. Ban cars? What about tobacco? Where does the nanny state end for you? People living in Tupperware?
        I’m fatally allergic to some meds. That doesn’t mean the rest of society is in the same risk. Ban the meds because some might die? If saving “just one life” is so important to you, I assume you want to ban abortion.
        Life has risks. You can slip and die in the shower. Ban showers?
        If you are afraid, stay home. Let the rest of us live.
        You really should be hesitant before accusing someone of arrogance and ignorance when you traffic so poorly in both.

        • Wow, you honestly think half a million fatalities from car accidents occur in the US? On average, fewer than 40,000 Americans die in car accidents annually. So no, obviously you pulled that out of thin air.

          The fact remains, if you could comprehend the risk of COVID you would be able to handle a conversation on it. Instead, you fall face first in the dirt in with every attempt.

  3. Honestly, if Trump had retaliated against China for this disease then all Americans would have had an easier time both medically and commercially. No, we don’t want Biden doing anything like that because everything he touches quickly turns to mud. So far as the cruise ship season, the huge number of seasonal workers who come to Juneau, Ketchikan, etc. just won’t come this year given the wage rates established by Amazon, Walmart, etc. Fewer locals will work because Biden is paying them to not work (some writer needs to total up the before-tax equivalent wage level for rent subsidies, food stamps, child care, etc. etc.) I must admit I would at least consider driving a tour bus for fun if they were standard shift, preferably an 18 speed Road Ranger. I’ve always been embarrassed for the bus drivers who drive buses with automatic transmissions. I know serious people who honestly believe that having the kind of armed forces personnel who need auto transmissions in military vehicles is very related to why we can lose a war to turbaned Muslims riding motorbikes.

    • Trump said so himself, Xi has it all under control, and it’s no worse than the flu. If that doesn’t constitute epic failure, then what does, in your opinion?

  4. More wildly overhyped and hysterical fearmongering over a virus variant as lethal as (or less lethal than) the common cold. I think that more and more people every day are waking up and rejecting the unscientific, untruthful, fearporn-laden official Wuhan Virus narrative.

    • Keep telling yourself that, Jeff, and eventually you might convince yourself of it.

      For now, you’re too dug in to retreat without losing face. I feel sorry for you.

      • Dog, a cursory glance of your comment to Jefferson might well reveal a more apt description of you and the others like you who have apparently lost all ability of critical thought. I mean, keep on following the Fausi / Big Pharma path, be sure to never question their “Science”.. Sure Dog, that’s the ticket!

        • Now that the omicron variant has been with us a few months, medical evidence is starting to emerge that it results in severe symptoms much less often than prior variants. I suspect that within a few weeks we will have a clearer picture and the CDC will revisit its recommendations re cruising. The evidence is rather overwhelming that, with past variants, it is the unvaccinated who largely end up with severe Covid and who die from it. While you won’t read about these studies on blogs that promote anti-vaccine propaganda, the vaccines have been extremely effective in reducing the risk of developing severe Covid. Study after study from around the country and around the world have demonstrated that Covid is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Lockdown and restrictions are now being imposed to prevent our health care system from being overwhelmed by patients who refused to get vaccinated. If omicron does not cause severe Covid in the unvaccinated, then I don’t see why the rest of us should continue shutting down to protect them from getting infected, At least in this country they have had more than ample time to get vaccinated if they want to.

      • Thank you for your latest expression of “projection as confession”, Whidbey. We’d expect nothing less from a radical leftist authoritarian extremist whose self-identity with a failing and insane narrative is slipping by the day, as that narrative is increasingly exposed for the multiple egregious lies, and inherently political agenda of subjugation and control, that it actually is.

    • The covidian cultist can’t help themselves. They are slaves to the media and Tony Fauci. Sadly, with their clot shot ravaged immune system, they now have reason to be afraid.

  5. This should be another banner year for mom-and-pop operations in the tourist business. The cruise ships provide little if any business in that regard.

  6. The UN (who owns the UN? Some person literally does) has funded the Covid budget through 3/31/25. Sooo, only three years to go! Interesting they know THE DAY it ends of this purely happenstance disease or series of covi diseases that overtakes the US government, laws, and Constitution. Could this have been predicted by anyone? I wonder.

  7. Stop testing.
    How many of those involved in the onboard “outbreaks” were “a symptomatic”?
    And, if vaccinated people can still spread and catch the virus, why recommend that everyone get vaxxed and boostered before boarding?
    It makes no sense.
    Businesses will continue to suffer as long as “testing” requirements remain in place.

  8. Summer, you haven’t been paying attention. If you’re vaccinated and boosted it’s at least 10 times less possible that this will kill you.

    If that’s not simple enough for you to understand, I don’t know how to make it any clearer.

    And as the vast majority of people agree, until they feel that it is safe out there, they will restrain their visits to restaurants, concerts, cruises, and the like.

    • The “vaccines” don’t work. This is obvious to everyone but the clot shot deluded. Clot shotters are far more like to get and fall ill than pure bloods.

  9. The latest CDC data indicates that 79% of new Omicron cases are in vaccinated individuals. The vaccines are failing miserably in preventing the spread of Omicron. Thank God the symptoms are mild, but as always, if you are obese or in bad health take precautions.

  10. Is there any government agency on earth, in the middle of a pandemic no less, that (a) does less to serve the public and (b) has lower credibility than the CDC? If there ever was a time for an agency to step up, solve critical problems and provide iron-clad advice, this is it. Instead, we have systemic failure. The agency should be abolished.

  11. Best advice I can give you in 2022. Whatever the CDC says, do the exact opposite and live in freedom from medical tyranny. The lies will not stop because the corrupt bureaucrats in Washington will not stop. They want to control you and hope to keep you in fear of a pandemic that has been over for some time now. The new pandemic is what the experimental and damaging vaccine is doing to people and Big Pharma is laughing all the way to the bank with almost 40 billion already made off of the misguided trust of the American people. The sooner Americans wake up and realize they have been used as Guinea Pigs, the better! The absolutely horrible things the vaccine is doing to people that the MSM and Social Media is covering up is the crime of the century. I just watched a testimony last night of a young 31 year old mother that developed MS like symptoms only 30mins after receiving her first jab. With over 20,000 deaths and 3 million adverse reactions, you would think our government would step in and stop the vaccines. Still trust your government? Time for military tribunals to throw these monsters in prison for the rest of their existence on this earth. Actually, the death penalty would be better and all that money Big Pharma made should be confiscated and given to the families of each an every victim.

    • Painted Pony, I feel sorry for all those misguided, uninformed and less educated Covidian Cultists and outright mindless sheep as well. Kneejerk conformists and quislings have never been known for their intelligence, though,.

    • They get brain fog as the clots gradually shut down the circulation. It will take them probably 10X as long as unclotted people for them to finally catch on. Unfortunately we’re going to see a lot of this over the next few years. Vacindents will become increasingly common.

  12. At the end of the day, Covid will do what it does regardless of vaccines, masks, and the petty tyranny of elected officials.
    Make your choice. Mask, don’t mask, booster, don’t booster, live in fear or live fearlessly.
    But stop preaching, bitching, ect. Go get on with your life and let others do the same.

  13. In other news, the CDC, along with the China Joe regime, er, administration, has advised all Americans to get their 2 clot shots + all 44 boosters, then go home, pull the shades, wrap oneself in bubblewrap, and wait for death on the sofa.

  14. 2021 – A Nearly Covid-free Review

    January
    Biden was being sworn in
    With Kamala stinking of gin
    The complaints of President Trump
    Several blocks away he would stump
    As the breech of Congress would begin
    February
    We rejoin the Paris Accord
    Bring more climate insanity to our shore
    Biden will go on unfettered
    And coax to build it back better
    While telling us to sacrifice more
    March
    The Ever Given gets stuck
    Sideways, the bow in the muc
    The beginning of shortage
    Unable to portage
    Blaming the pilot, poor schmuck
    April
    The Chauvin trial comes to an end
    From putting George’s neck in a bend
    From which he could not hold out
    Put the country in a rout
    As we hoped that we all could mend
    May
    Space X comes down without pause
    To the nation’s pride and applause
    Elon’s success in the race
    Ready to commercialize space
    Showing Jeff he’s the space boss
    June
    Tradegy comes to Surfside
    Killing 98 where they reside
    The building’s collapse
    From corrosion’s gaps
    How badly the responders cried
    July
    The Olympic games in Japan
    Put many medals in the USA pan
    A break from mental gymnastics
    And covid mathematics
    We’ll take a break when we can
    August
    From Afghanistan we did withdraw
    A sight stuck in Americans craw
    Joe did it in reverse
    Only making things worse
    His version of shock and awe
    September
    Texas comes up with a fix
    No abortions after six
    Joe tried his powers
    The Supremes said it’s not ours
    As both sides got into the mix
    October
    WHO endorses a vaccine
    To erase malaria from the scene
    But people get in fights
    Over covid vax rights
    And the big pharma machine
    November
    Atlanta wins their fourth series
    Making the Astros look weary
    At least Houston didn’t cheat
    As they went down to defeat
    A respite from all our worries
    December
    A disaster right from the start
    Tornados rip places apart
    Tossing everything wildly about
    And the nation tries to help out
    Feeling their pain in our heart

    2022

    We wait for 2022
    With bated breath to come through
    What will come the new year
    What will we have to fear
    Let’s hope its not 2020 too!

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