This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
I wrote recently about some of the companies that have been mistreating their employees and customers during the pandemic, and I want to tell you today about another case study. It comes from the cruise industry.
If you’ve ever been on a cruise, you’ve probably heard the captain and crew claim that their top priority is the safety of their passengers. It’s a staple of the announcements that go over a ship’s loudspeakers. But the recent actions of several major cruise lines aren’t consistent with those claims: The companies put a higher priority on continuing to operate their ships — and make money — than on protecting their passengers and employees.
I’m going to focus on a single ship in today’s newsletter: the Eclipse, which is operated by Celebrity Cruises, part of the Royal Caribbean Cruise company. But the pattern extends to some other ships and companies, as well. To read more on the subject, check out recent coverage in The Times, The Guardian and The Miami Herald.
As The Herald has written, the cruise industry “downplayed the dangers to consumers and kept sending out ships despite outbreaks on board and warnings from public health officials.” Since then, industry officials have “largely stayed silent about the toll.”
Below is a timeline of the events involving the Eclipse, based largely on a story in The Washington Post, which has been doing excellent investigative work on this subject:
February: It becomes clear that the virus can spread very quickly on cruise ships. An outbreak on the Diamond Princess receives worldwide attention. “People on a large ship, all together, at the same time, all the time — you couldn’t ask for a better incubator for infection,” Anthony Fauci, the immunologist, says.
March 1: The Eclipse departs on its voyage from Buenos Aires.
March 7: Executives in the cruise industry meet with Vice President Mike Pence and argue that they can contain the virus while continuing to sail.
March 8: Fauci warns older people and anyone with a medical issue to stay away from cruise ships. The State Department goes further: “U.S. citizens, particularly travelers with underlying health conditions, should not travel by cruise ship.”
March 13: The cruise industry agrees to stop operations in the United States for 30 days.
Mid-March: All the while, the Eclipse sails on, with the ship’s officers telling passengers that there are no virus cases on board. The ship’s captain uses the phrase “healthy ship,” according to one passenger. In fact, multiple passengers are reporting flulike symptoms, which the ship’s medical staff tells them are not serious.
March 21: The Eclipse holds a packed celebration on its pool deck. (You can see a photo by scrolling down just a bit here.) Amazingly, the celebration was meant to honor health care workers battling the virus around the world. The ship holds multiple other packed events, as well. “They actually made more activities, to keep people occupied,” Vivian Miller, 77, a passenger, said.
March 30: The ships docks in San Diego. It’s now clear that dozens of people on it have the coronavirus. At least one will die, according to KUSI in San Diego. “If they honestly thought that all these people who were getting sick had colds and bronchitis and pneumonia,” David Nystrom, 75, whose wife got sick on the ship, told The Post, “I don’t know what to say.”
As The Post story — which is by Rosalind S. Helderman, Hannah Sampson, Dalton Bennett and Andrew Ba Tran — concludes: The Eclipse was “among scores of ships that continued voyages even after early outbreaks on other vessels, carrying thousands of international passengers to far-flung ports and helping seed the virus around the globe, health officials say.”
If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.