What’s next??
An interesting note at my company:
This year we have not had any C19 infections reported aboard ship. We still test for C19 on the sailing day for each voyage: no one has tested positive this year on sailing day. My guess: between prior infections and vaccination, most of our people have good immunity, at least for the immediate time window.
(No doubt several people have come down with C19 when not on a voyage, but we don’t track that.)
In fact, standard shipboard respiratory diseases such as common cold are much less this year than in pre-pandemic years. Why? Don’t know.
Could it also be perhaps that as the virus mutates and different strains evolve the testing you do is not accurate? Meaning, you are possibly getting false negatives?
If no one is showing symptoms aboard, I really don’t care. But what are the odds of false negatives AND no symptoms?
I’ve had it twice. The second time was nowhere near as bad as the first. No false negatives on the test.
I think People started washing their hands/high contact areas. There are things like buffets where I think, how did we survive pre Covid. I think some lingering COVID protocols and habits do a lot of good for preventing less resilient bugs. I haven’t really been sick since before 2019 either.
I agree . And I give us a year before most of the populace backslides… but it’s nice while it lasts.
Come the end of the year our captains will vote whether they want to continue testing on sailing-day. Right now if someone tested positive they would likely still sail and work, but take some simple precautions not to spread it. In the past, in the few cases we had, this prevented the spread.
Now scientists have made a simple dual home test for both c19 and flu So do we switch to these? In pre-COVID times we used to look at flu-spread throughout the crew as inevitable. Now we know from experience with c19 that the spread of such diseases throughout a crew is a choice.
That’s good news. I hadn’t previously seen any first hand data. Do you think that your guys are doing anything special?
That article doesn’t say the pandemic is officially over. From the article: “The WHO said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic declared in March 2020 has not come to an end”.
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No. They live normal lives. They have wives and kids. They travel. Just like everyone else. The puzzling thing to me is the drop in ALL respiratory diseases aboard ship, at least in the three companies I know of.
Last winter the warning was for an increase worldwide in flu etc. And there was a spike in some, like RSV in kids. But the spike quickly subsided. A mystery.
So maybe it is just the effect of increased hand washing, sneeze shields, etc. everywhere. (Likely to be forgotten soon.)
I’m not complaining. In three years the only thing I’ve caught was C19 and it lasted three days.
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