For smooth sailing
number of passionate cruise fans in Australia who are keen to travel again as soon as they can,” Mr Katz said.
“The extensive new health measures planned by cruise lines will help give them confidence.”
Carnival Australia and P&O Cruises Australia president Sture Myrmell said their seven cruise lines — P&O Cruises Australia, Carnival Cruise Line, Princess Cruises, Cunard, Holland America Line, Seabourn and P&O Cruises World Cruising — were preparing to return to sailing when right.
“We know there is a vast reservoir of hundreds of thousands of experienced cruisers who are looking forward to sailing again but like us they are taking a realistic and pragmatic approach,” the CLIA spokesman said.
“Future cruise programs are being released by our cruise lines and the response has been both gratifying and encouraging.
“We are ensuring that bookings can be made with minimal financial outlays and, the time was should it become necessary due to the pause, with generous and flexible cancellation arrangements.”
Sydney Cruise blogger Honida Beram has been on 25 cruises – eight last year alone. She quit her job last year to follow her passion, with 300,000 readers on her blog Cruising with Honey and 2.5 million page impressions and strong social media following.
“It has really affected people because if you love cruising it takes a lot of your time thinking about past cruises and planning new ones – it
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FTE: gives you a sense of hope, freedom and enjoyment,” the mother of three said.
“It’s a whole state of mind.” She said passionate cruisers like herself were worried about crew who had lost their jobs, primary producers, food and beverage divisions, travel agents – the entire industry that needed support.
“So many people have been affected by the cruise pause, but I’m trying to keep hope alive … it will come back and cruisers will be able to get back to doing what they love to do,” she said.
Vaccines mon early in the pandemic. Since then, the virus has evolved to the dominant Gstrain, which now accounts for about 85 per cent of published SARS-COV-2 genomes.
There had been fears the Gstrain, with a D614G mutation in the main protein on the surface of the virus, could resist vaccines under development but researchers have found no evidence the change would adversely affect the efficacy of vaccine candidates.
CSIRO chief executive Dr
Larry Marshall said the research was critical in the race to develop a vaccine.
“This brings the world one step closer to a safe and effective vaccine to protect people and save lives. Research like this, at speed, is only possible through deep collaboration with partners both in Australia and around the world,” he said.
Dr S S Vasan, CSIRO’S dangerous pathogens team leader and the senior author of the paper, said this was good news for the hundreds of vaccines in development around the world.
“Most COVID-19 vaccine candidates target the virus’s spike protein, as this binds to the ACE2 receptors in our lungs and airways which are the entry point to infect cells,” Dr Vasan said.
“Despite this D614G mutation to the spike protein, we confirmed through experiments and modelling that vaccine candidates are still effective.
“We’ve also found the Gstrain is unlikely to require frequent ‘vaccine matching’ where new vaccines need to be developed seasonally to combat the virus strains in circulation, as is the case with influenza,” he said.
CSIRO recently concluded preclinical studies for two vaccine candidates from Inovio Pharmaceuticals and the University of Oxford at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness, with peerreviewed reports to be published in the coming months.