Has Covid changed cruising?

After our cruise last year, when I and my husband both unfortunately caught Covid on board, I wrote a post about how Covid has changed cruising. At the time I would have said that Covid had definitely changed cruising. But having recently returned from two short cruises, one with Royal Caribbean and one with Disney, I thought I'd write an update post about how things area looking nearly a year on. Pre-Covid, cruise ships were already notorious for spreading illness quickly, and at the beginning of the pandemic there were many large Covid outbreaks on board cruise ships.

The biggest difference from our cruise last year is that you no longer need to provide any information about vaccination or produce any negative tests. You do always have to fill out a health questionnaire before cruising. In the past this was aimed at catching the norovirus type sickness bugs but now it asks for things like a temperature, cough, loss of taste or smell and so on. 

On our last cruise all the crew were wearing masks at all times but this was no longer the case. This time I spotted a single passenger wearing a mask on the first day, and after that none. 

We noticed that Royal Caribbean still had plenty of hand sanitiser stations dotted around the ship, in particular outside restaurants (along with full sink hand washing facilities), by the lifts and at the main entrances to the deck areas. On the Disney ship we didn't see a single extra hand sanitiser station, just the usual hand washing areas outside restaurants.

On the Disney Wish, which is a newer ship that first launched after Covid, we did notice that some of the areas in the main buffet are behind screens and you ask for the food that you would like to be served to you. Also on both ships you can no longer help yourself to ice-cream. However on the Wish there are still many drinks stations and other food areas where you can help yourself so I'm not sure that the screens can really make much difference. 

There are many times on a cruise that you are in a tightly packed area - for example while dining, in lifts, in theatres, in queues to get on and off the ship or for excursions. It's impossible to social distance at these times and no-one seemed to be worried. 

In the two Facebook groups for the cruises I didn't see any anxiety about Covid before we sailed. And in only one of the groups did anyone admit to having come back with Covid. On the last cruise it felt as though most of the ship brought it home! So maybe with so many people either being vaccinated or already having been exposed to Covid it just isn't so much of a risk anymore, and you are no more likely to catch Covid on a cruise than anywhere else.

So I would have to say that no, a couple of years on, Covid hasn't changed cruising. When the cruises first started back up there many have been a few additional changes made, vaccination requirements, extra signage and so on, but they have now disappeared and only the usual pre-Covid health measures like encouraging frequent hand washing have remained.

How cruising has changed since Covid

A couple of weeks ago we embarked on our first family cruise post-Covid. My husband found an amazing last minute deal on Royal Caribbean's Anthem of the Seas - a ship that we were actually due to sail on back in April 2020. We cruised for a week from Southampton, visiting La Rochelle and Le Havre in France and La Coruna and Bilbao in Spain. 

Cruise ship testing rules are changing all the time. When we cruised, all over 12s needed to be fully vaccinated and all passengers needed to have a supervised negative lateral flow test result within 48 hours of the cruise date (unvaccinated children under 12 within 24 hours). We did our lateral flow test online with DocHQ the day before which was very straightforward, although I did feel that I couldn't start properly packing until we had received that negative result!

Once onboard we noticed very little change to our usual cruising experience. We purchased expensive FFP2 masks which we wore whenever we were walking around the ship and we avoided the lifts and other crowded areas whenever we could. However we were definitely in the minority. Although the crew wore masks, only a handful of fellow passengers wore them.

There were a lot more hand sanitiser stations than I've been used to seeing on a ship, but generally handwashing is very much encouraged on cruise ships anyway. There was plenty of signage to encourage social distancing but no actual enforcement. The buffet and other eating areas were operating as normal. 

Of course we knew that the Covid risk on a cruise ship would be very high, and so despite the precautions that we took we weren't particular surprised that both me and my husband caught Covid on board. Judging by the comments in our cruise Facebook group we were far from alone, and a huge number of people came down with it. 

It's difficult to know what we personally could have done differently to avoid it. Perhaps mask wearing needs to be more strictly enforced among passengers, but I'm not sure that would make much difference. 

I think if you are taking a cruise holiday you just have to be realistic about the fact that there's a good chance you'll be bringing Covid home and if you are particularly at risk of serious complications from Covid then you need to consider whether it's the right holiday for you at this time.

Emerging from Covid

Last week Covid-19 finally caught up with me. By now I had assumed that I was either immune or had already had it but been asymptomatic, so it was a bit of an unwelcome shock to actually test positive. Although it wasn't exactly unexpected - I caught it on a cruise and was fully aware that it was a high risk holiday.  I also wasn't alone, my husband caught it again too as well as a large percentage of the people on our sailing judging by the cruise Facebook group. 

But it did surprise me just how ill I have been with it. I'm not overweight, I exercise regularly and I'm in general good health. Even though I didn't really suffer any respiratory symptoms apart from congestion and a cough I did have a couple of days in bed with a fever and dizziness, and then after that it's been fatigue and just generally feeling unwell. 

I'm into the second week now, and after spending far too long lying about on the sofa mindlessly scrolling through my phone I'm finally beginning to feel a bit more like myself. I've managed to take the children out to the beach, I've caught up with the holiday washing, sorted out some of the poor dead plants in the garden that died during the heatwave and even made a half-hearted attempt at cutting back some of our overgrown front hedge.

Soon I'm hoping to turn to the tasks that need a bit more brain power - I feel like everything is still all foggy! I have lots of e-mails to answer, blog posts to write, not to mention trying to do a bit of the work that I do from home. I've just not been able to concentrate properly on anything!

I'm definitely on the mend and I had my first negative test today so it has officially left my system, just hoping that I'm starting to feel normal again soon!

Photo credit John Cameron via Unsplash