Dolven goes on to report about the initial article she published and the reactions of various ship captains. Several captains actually disputed the accuracy and substance of her reports were false. Specifically, as noted by Dolven in the opening of her earlier article “[c]ruise companies are allowed to disembark and repatriate people still trapped on ships around the U.S. by private transportation as long as their executives sign an agreement with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that holds the companies accountable for the process. They are refusing to do so.” The cruise lines are balking at being assigned responsibility for repatriating the 100,000+ men and women that deserve to go home that are stuck on cruise ships around the world. As if that isn’t bad enough, the cruise lines are going so far as to LIE in response to inquiries about their interactions with, and what has been asked of them by, the Center for Disease Controls. In fact, “In conversations with the CDC, cruise company officials have complained that arranging private transportation for disembarking crew is ‘too expensive,’ according to a spokesperson for the agency.”

In context, that whole back and forth, he said/she said is “preventing about 100,000 crew members and some passengers from leaving cruise ships lingering in and around U.S. waters, including dozens of U.S. citizens. Crew members still stuck on board say they feel like an afterthought after watching their companies move mountains to repatriate passengers on charter flights and other private transportation after the industry was shut down on March 13. Only a handful of ships still have passengers on them, including Carnival Corporation’s Coral Princess, floating off of South Florida.”

 

When asked about the cruise lines attitude towards getting their loyal crews home, the CDC’s director of the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine Dr. Martin Cetron,  said in a phone interview Friday that the information is false. Charter flights are allowed. Companies have repeatedly told the agency that they can’t afford private transportation for crew, he said. “Some of the lines have really disappointed us about not cooperating,” he said. “What they’ve said repeatedly is we can’t do that, we can’t afford to do that. Their answers are not aligned with the public health needs.”

Or their crew’s needs either, that’s for sure. The Cruise Lines are blame the CDC but the CDC has given the cruise lines green lights to charter planes and repatriate their crew to their friends and families. Instead, because of their money concerns, or their disdain for their crew, they are keeping the men and women that work on those ships trapped on board. Give that a few seconds to sink in. . . On board the cruise ships, notorious for being the main source of transmission of the virus in the early days of the pandemic, are now the floating prisons many of the crew members find themselves in.