Expert sees no fear in cruising
THE Australian doctor sent to contain the coronavirus outbreak on the Ruby Princess says there is nothing to fear about the ground zero pandemic cruise ship and he would definitely holiday on it.
Dr John Parker was also sent in to contain outbreaks on the Diamond Princess in Tokyo and the Grand Princess in San Francisco.
And while he said cruising would never be the same, he was adamant he would go on those ships in the future.
Dr Parker is advising cruise companies how to make ships safer — from crew accommodation through to airconditioning, infection control and even apps that could help the ship’s doctor know in real time whether any passengers or crew were sick.
It would be safe for passengers to be aboard the infected ships in the future because the virus did not live very long on its own, he said.
Within a couple of weeks any viral particles left on infected cruise ships or hotel rooms housing quarantined passengers would no longer be infectious, he said.
But he said COVID-19 had changed cruising.
“It won’t be quite as crowded. You’ve got to have social distancing and the crew will have to have individual cabins,” he said.
Filters on airconditioning systems on airlines were of a much higher standard than those on cruise ships, something cruise companies may wish to modify, he said.
Another innovation could be to extend an app initially set up for infected crew members to all passengers and crew so they could record their temperature each day.
No stranger to deadly disease, the former rural GP has been on the frontline in medical disasters for nearly 30 years and worked in a Rwandan refugee camp where 40,000 people died from cholera.
In 2015 he worked in an ebola hospital in Sierra Leone and not one of the medicos he worked with contracted the disease — which kills 70 per cent of its victims — because they followed strict protocols.
Dr Parker had nothing to do with the decision to allow infected patients off the Ruby Princess in Sydney which he described as a “cascade of cock-ups” for which no one person was to blame.
Asked if he would ever go on a cruise on one of those ships in the future, he said, “Yes. Eventually cruising will become safe again, even safer than before.”