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Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic



Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic PDF

Author: Michael Smith

Publisher: Doubleday

Genres:

Publish Date: June 21, 2022

ISBN-10: 0385547404

Pages: 272

File Type: Epub

Language: English

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Book Preface

MARCH 6, 2020

Quinquela Martín Cruise Ship Port,
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Wiwit Widarto walked down the gangway of the MS Zaandam and into the bustle of Buenos Aires, another twelve hours in the cruise ship’s sweltering laundry behind him. He’d worked relentlessly, enduring all day on his feet in the bowels of the ship. In one marathon shift, Wiwit and his crew had cleaned dirty sheets, towels, and linens from the ship’s 716 cabins, making way for a new cruise with a slew of fresh passengers—more than twelve hundred in all—from all over the world.

For a precious few hours, Wiwit was free. He walked along the dock, the 781-foot-long ship towering above, the navy blue hull topped by a glimmering white superstructure. With an oversized funnel and lights along the railings that twinkled against the darkening sky, its elegant silhouette evoked the golden era of transatlantic travel, that of the Titanic. Another couple of decks were set at or just above the waterline; it was in this cramped underbelly, with little natural light, where Wiwit worked, slept, and lived.

Wiwit joined up with six friends—fellow Indonesians and coworkers—all eager to explore the city’s famous nightlife before embarking the next day on a monthlong voyage around the tip of South America. En route to dinner, their taxi wove around the city’s leafy Parisian-inspired boulevards and manicured squares. It was 10:00 p.m., early for porteños. The crowds were starting to parade by the tango bars, white-tablecloth restaurants, and baroque cafés with irresistible pastries displayed in glass cases as if they were jewels. Traffic crawled along streets lined with mansard-roofed neo-Parisian mansions, Art Deco apartment buildings, and quaint Tudor-style homes—built a century ago by waves of European immigrants. The city felt far removed from the ominous warnings about a deadly virus that had spread out of China, to Italy, then Spain and the rest of Europe, and now the United States. Argentina had registered perhaps a dozen cases and one death, hardly a blip on most people’s radar.

Wiwit and his fellow coworkers settled in for dinner and chitchat. Life on the Zaandam was tribal. There were dozens of nationalities aboard, and they gathered to speak in their native tongues, prepare their traditional foods, and share communal prayers. Hundreds of citizens from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand worked aboard the Zaandam, many employed in housekeeping and hotel services. They rarely had a free day on land. They were responsible for making the beds, cleaning the toilets, washing the linens, and responding to the summonses and whims of the passengers aboard the Zaandam. Throughout the day, the housekeeping staff checked each room, tidying up messes, folding towels into animal figures, all the time speaking English with the guests. But now, they could briefly forget about those duties. It was time for a burger at a bar in Palermo, one of the more elegant of four dozen neighborhoods in the sprawling city of fifteen million. This was their last weekend on land before more seven-day workweeks and the twelve- and often fourteen-hour shifts they were used to.

From their table, they looked out at the bars and restaurants packed around the square. Families strolled the well-lit streets, locking arms. Couples sipped wine at outdoor bistros; friends crowded together, all seeming to yell at once, gesturing wildly, enjoying a beautiful evening together.

A compact, balding man with closely cropped black hair and a deeply etched smile, Wiwit had worked on cruise ships for almost thirty of his fifty years. God’s will and an evangelical Christian faith had guided him. On every cruise, he organized Bible-study groups for coworkers and was known for his mastery of applying the Word to the difficult life he and his fellow workers all led at sea. Lately, however, Wiwit was worried this volatile virus spreading from Wuhan, China, would find its way into his family’s home in Batam, Indonesia. Now Wiwit was on the Zaandam, traveling to the end of the world, near Antarctica, but he worried about the medical care back in Batam. Would this disease strike down his wife? His two sons?

It was a rollicking, end-of-the-austral-summer weekend in Buenos Aires. On Saturday night, after the slew of new passengers had filled the Zaandam, the Backstreet Boys brought their hits to a packed open-air crowd on the Campo Argentino de Polo. A.J., Howie, Nick, Kevin, and Brian crooned, “When the cold air starts filling up my lungs!” and the largely female crowd echoed the chorus throughout: “My lungs…Oh, I breathe.” For the entire duration of the concert, thirty thousand fans were on their feet, screaming, singing, shrieking.

Across town, adjacent to a neighborhood of pastel-colored wooden shacks known as La Boca, an even larger crowd of 54,000 people crowded into the football stadium, La Bombonera, for a crucial match on the home turf of Boca Juniors. In Argentina, soccer is religion. A Boca win against Gimnasia that night would eliminate archrival River Plate from the championship. The crowd went wild during the pregame show. Maradona, the former Boca midfielder and Argentine national hero, limped slowly onto the field. The legendary U-shaped stadium vibrated as if rattled by an earthquake. Euphoric fans stomped their feet, launched fireworks, and unfurled massive banners in the stands. Holding court, Maradona reigned supreme, hugging and kissing player after player, like a priest giving his blessing. Maradona paused, then raised both arms to the crowd, beckoning them to scream louder, as he used to when he ruled this same pitch thirty years earlier. Boca honored Maradona’s legacy and triumphed 1–0, taking the championship. Fans flooded the streets of Buenos Aires, waving flags, chanting victory songs, and mocking distraught River fans. As hundreds of travelers continued to board the Zaandam, promises of heightened medical checks didn’t materialize. Some passengers were questioned about their travels. Many simply showed up from the United States, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Australia and walked aboard, few questions asked.

The Zaandam catered to seniors; more than three-quarters were over sixty-five years old. Many passengers were in their eighties. They’d all spent thousands of dollars for an exotic voyage to penguin colonies and glacier fields, and through the Strait of Magellan. Ten stories tall and the length of two football fields, the Zaandam promised elegance, but it was a little worn-out. This would be one of the last cruises before the ship’s once-every-few-years maintenance overhaul. Holland America planned to send the Zaandam into dry dock not long after this cruise ended in Port Everglades, Florida. Welders, painters, and cleaners would come aboard, clambering through its crevices like worker ants in a frenetic mission to overhaul everything from the small infirmary to the sealed porthole windows in the cabins.

Passenger Lance Hutton noticed the Zaandam could use a face-lift as he boarded, but he didn’t care. Cruising was comfortable, predictable, and educational. Just how he liked to travel. He’d been on eighteen cruises since retiring two decades earlier after a career as a teacher, principal, superintendent, and administrator of public schools in Missouri. He’d seen a lot of the world from the deck of a cruise ship. But there was one adventure he still craved, a hike up the Andes Mountains to Machu Picchu. Lance was a straightforward man. He’d lived in Missouri much of his life, mostly in small towns. But for reasons he couldn’t explain even to himself, he couldn’t shake the dream of visiting the shrouded Incan city, high above the Peruvian jungle. Six months earlier, he’d booked passage on the Zaandam with Sharon, his college sweetheart and wife of fifty-six years. They’d paid thousands extra for the excursion to Machu Picchu, and finally Lance Hutton was going to explore the famed hidden city.

Stocky, soft-spoken, with intense brown eyes and full head of hair that belied his age, Lance wasn’t easily flustered. He’d mastered keeping his calm, carefully choosing his words, working through a problem before making a decision, acting resolutely and without hesitation so that his teachers and kids would follow. But he worried about Sharon, not because she was seventy-nine, just a year younger than he was. It was her lungs. Her bronchiectasis, a chronic respiratory condition, put her in the high-risk category for those susceptible to this strange new virus. It seemed to prey on people like her. But ten days before the Zaandam was set to embark, Holland America Line, which operated the Zaandam, made it clear to Lance that refunds were not an option. The cruise line sent him an email specifying that refunds were limited to customers with proof of direct contact with someone who had tested positive or who’d traveled to China. From what Lance understood, the preexisting medical condition that made Sharon more susceptible did not qualify them for a refund.

Lance had checked his email again before boarding the long flight to Argentina, but there were no new communications. Throwing away twenty thousand dollars felt too extravagant. Lance wasn’t a rich man, never had been. He’d raised his family on an educator’s salary. Sharon did secretarial work here and there. They’d practically built their own house and lived frugally. They couldn’t bring themselves to toss away that kind of money. So they rationalized away the fear of the new disease, and the worries about Sharon’s lungs. Aboard the Zaandam, they settled into their cabin on Dolphin Deck, the entire room only slightly bigger than a queen-size bed. If it were too dangerous, he told himself, Holland America would not have let them aboard. Whatever is going to happen will happen, he thought. No sense worrying anymore. It was a gamble—Lance knew that—and he wasn’t a gambler. But it was too late to turn back.

Down the hall, Carl Zehner and Leonard Lindsay began to settle into their cabin, unpack their bags. Leo mentioned that check-in had been fast. He’d expected that heightened medical protocols would slow boarding. News broadcasts were awash with stories of cruise ship outbreaks. Two Holland America ships—the Grand Princess and the Ruby Princess—were suffering COVID-19 outbreaks off the Pacific coast of the United States and Sydney, Australia, respectively. Weeks earlier, the Diamond Princess had been hit hard in Japan, with at least nine passengers dead and hundreds infected. But on the Zaandam, in another hemisphere, there seemed to be little more of a medical screening than normal on a cruise, a short questionnaire, asking whether they’d had a cough or fever or recent contact with China. The only novelty he noticed was a quick temperature check.

Carl and Leo had been planning this cruise for a special occasion: their fortieth anniversary. Leo, a retired nurse, was concerned about boarding a cruise ship with a pandemic spreading. But Holland America had issued statements and sent emails, explaining all the care they were taking to prevent just such outbreaks. It felt like they were being encouraged to get on the ship, especially after the company awarded them four hundred dollars in ship credits. But Leo, a slightly portly man with a full head of dark hair, was a worrier by nature, especially when it came to health issues. Carl, a wiry, white-haired Eagle Scout and Vietnam War veteran, put Leo at ease, as always. They’d been on fifty cruises together, including a dozen on Holland America ships. The cruise line was their favorite and would take care of them, as usual. “We trusted them, because our outcomes have been good with Holland America,” said Leo. “We felt like they had our safety and our health most in their minds.”

Two decks above, Claudia Osiani sat in her cabin, looking out the window at a bulkhead and life raft as she sought to dismiss her anxieties. Claudia had worked three decades as a psychologist, and it was her job to analyze what was behind these feelings, but she couldn’t pin it down. This cruise was a birthday present from her husband, Juan Henning. Aboard the Zaandam, in a few days, she would celebrate her sixty-fourth birthday. She couldn’t bring herself to let that inner voice get in the way of enjoying the trip, much less cancel it. So Claudia did what a psychologist shouldn’t do when it comes to feelings—she ignored them. I won’t tell Juan that I am worried, she told herself.

On the five-hour drive to Buenos Aires from their home in Mar del Plata, they had discussed at length the recent deadly virus outbreaks on several cruise ships in other parts of the world. “This cruise is different; it will be packed with locals,” they reassured each other. It made them feel safer. Juan had sacrificed deeply to provide Claudia this present. She loved him too much to let on that she was worried. They had been together for forty-two years and complemented each other. Claudia was a stickler for detail and liked to dress well, keep in shape, make sure her hair kept a blond hue and that her makeup was just right. She was the gregarious, rather emotional half of the marriage, prone to speaking her mind, making grand gestures. Juan, a soft-spoken accountant, was in many ways her opposite. His mother was an English immigrant; his father hailed from the Netherlands. But they’d made it work, raising three kids who’d already given them nine grandchildren. “We’re going so far south,” she told Juan in the car. “It’s going to be a bunch of Argentines on that ship, maybe some Chileans.”

They spotted the Zaandam as they arrived at the Port of Buenos Aires. Christened in May 2000, the Dutch-flagged Zaandam had the feel of an ocean liner of a bygone age. It was steeped in the 147-year history of the Holland America Line, born in an era of transatlantic passenger ship travel. Known as “the Spotless Line,” Holland America was for decades the industry leader in service and style. As a sister company of the White Star Line, Holland America steamships were related to the Titanic.

As the couple boarded the ship, they were shocked. Almost none of the passengers came from Argentina or South America. Their hopes of cruising with people from places where COVID-19 hadn’t yet taken hold were shattered. Aboard the Zaandam were 305 Americans, 247 Canadians, 229 UK citizens, 105 French, and 131 Australians. The passengers crowded around one another, leaning in, talking, hugging, laughing. No social-distancing protocols were visible. Claudia heard a cough, then another, and wanted to hide. “All those people were from where the pandemic was,” she recalled. “It was kind of scary.”

Donna Mann and Jorge Hill, her seventy-nine-year-old partner, were discussing just that as they settled into their cabin. “Wasn’t that strange,” Donna commented. She was sure Holland America had warned in an email that it would be examining every passenger’s passport to see where each person had traveled. COVID-19 was spreading massively in China and more recently in Italy. Surely, they would want to flag people who had been to those places recently, at least for a tougher medical screening. “Yes,” Jorge replied. “They didn’t even go through the pages.”

The couple had worried about COVID-19, even thought about canceling the trip. Jorge tracked the Zaandam online, and he was relieved to see the ship had been in South America since the fall. Together, they watched the news, and prior to leaving their home in California, they noted with calm that just one COVID-19 case had been logged in Brazil, and it was someone who had traveled through Italy. But what swayed them was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, located in Bethesda, Maryland. He’d been their voice of reason since this epidemic began. Donna had known about him since the 1980s, when he led the national response to HIV. Shortly before they embarked, they caught snippets of interviews in which Fauci seemed to say that international travel was safe. But the lack of much real scrutiny while boarding rankled Donna. No one even checked her temperature. Donna and Jorge didn’t know that temperature checks were not mandatory aboard the Holland America fleet until March 15, more than a full week later.

MARCH 8, 8:00 A.M.

Buenos Aires, Argentina, Aboard the Zaandam

The main crew hallway on B Deck buzzed with activity. Workers jokingly dubbed it “I-95,” after the interstate highway. At the stern end of the corridor that ran the length of B Deck, Wiwit Widarto was at his post inside the laundry operations center, working amid the whir of the huge washers and dryers. He had everyone coming at him—typical for the beginning of a cruise. The housekeeping staff needed linen napkins, tablecloths, and perfectly pressed sheets by the hundreds.

The laundry operation was like the crowded floor of an old-world factory. Sixteen people moved amid a patchwork of windowless rooms crammed with oversized washers, dryers, and pressers. Next door, three tailors were mending a stack of crew uniforms. Wiwit oversaw it all. He’d first worked for Holland America when he was barely twenty years old. His job included free room and board, so expenses were limited. Every month, Wiwit sent roughly fourteen hundred dollars to his family. This was far more than he could save working at a hotel or restaurant back in Indonesia. It was a grueling schedule. Wiwit worked seven days a week; he was always moving. There were few days off during his contracts, which typically ran from six to ten months.

Wiwit missed many Christmases with the family because of his job. When he returned home, sometimes it was only for a month; then he would head back to join the next ship. He’d first joined the cruise industry to recoup the costs of his wedding, sending home a bit less than five hundred dollars a month. This job is temporary, he told his young wife. But work opportunities in Indonesia were limited.

After leaving the cruise ship industry in order to work closer to home, Wiwit spent two years in Indonesia. Then he returned to the sea, this time to fund the down payment on the family home. Over the years—and then decades—there were always reasons to return to sea, to continue the sacrifice, to pay for a better life for his family. Wiwit rarely complained. He believed that this is where God wanted him to be. That’s what he told the Bible-study group when they met Sunday evenings aboard the ship, after everyone was done with their shifts.

A year earlier, in 2019, Wiwit received a major promotion to supervisor and was running the laundry. He could now work on a six-month contract. In June, he could go home to Batam, Indonesia, across the strait from Singapore. He wanted to spend as much time as possible with Anny, his wife. Working ships, Wiwit had missed so much. Anny had raised their two sons, Matthew and Bryan, often alone. The previous July, when Wiwit celebrated his fiftieth birthday, he’d promised Anny that he’d retire soon. Then he would be home to stay. They could open the restaurant they had long dreamed about. “Just a couple of years,” he told Anny, “and it will all be different.”

But now Wiwit was busy getting his crew to finish dealing with the carts filled with dirty linens. They had to get through them all, and fast. Complaining wasn’t an option, and besides, they all knew that this is how cruise ships operated.

Worldwide, nearly 200,000 men and women kept these massive floating hotels running. On the Holland America Line, two-thirds hailed from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. On the Zaandam, most of the six hundred employees worked, ate, drank, and slept on A Deck and B Deck, an unseen village out of sight of any passenger and not mentioned in any glossy brochure. Most workers bunked two to a cabin in windowless spaces and shared a bathroom among four mates. They ate in the crew mess, mid-ship on A Deck, drank in the adjacent crew bar. They made it up to the upper decks only when passengers needed them.

The captain, his top officers, and those who ran the food, beverage, entertainment, hotel, and medical operations worked and lived on the upper decks. Most of these men and women were grouped by nationality. The Dutch tended to run the bridge. The Europeans and Americans ran the entertainment side of the operation. Medical staff came from South Africa. Many of these employees were privy to benefits, including individual cabins with windows, private bathrooms, and, in some cases, open-air balconies. They had their own bar and minimal restrictions on mixing it up with the passengers.

None of that bothered Wiwit. What he did worry about was this virus. He had talked about it with Anny when she texted and said she was concerned about his safety on the ship. “Don’t worry,” he’d assured her before the cruise began. “We are on the other side of the world from all that. The cruise line says we are fine.” Wiwit had reason to be concerned. But for now, he didn’t have time to dwell on that. Work called.

Erin Montgomery sat inside her small office on Lower Promenade Deck, reviewing the sanitation protocols one more time. There were so many details. Were the refrigerators clean? Was the pool sterilized? Erin understood the dangers of viral transmission in such a high-density environment.

Erin had worked cruise ships for three years. A divorced mother of five, she had gone through a lot to get there. She started working in restaurants at fifteen, moving to teaching culinary arts in California so that she’d have more time to raise her kids. When her youngest daughter finished school, Erin sought adventure, and scored a job producing and hosting the shipboard version of PBS’s America’s Test Kitchen cooking show. Erin had cooked on nine Holland America ships and loved it. Her blond hair, bright blue eyes, and contagious laugh made Erin seem younger than her fifty-six years. She was funny, forceful, and full of confidence, which helped when she had to cook and perform for hundreds of passengers simultaneously, day in and day out. Erin loved dressing in her chef’s whites, cooking for the camera, making people happy. But one year earlier, she had heard about a newly created job: sanitation officer.

This was a position born out of a 2016 criminal case that federal prosecutors had successfully brought against Holland America’s Princess Cruises (as well as its parent company, Carnival Corporation), for years of dumping oily wastewater from its ships into U.S. waters and the pristine seas around the Bahamas. Carnival sought to conceal the pollution from federal regulators, resulting in a forty-million-dollar criminal penalty and a five-year term of probation. That massive fine was followed in 2019 by an additional twenty-million-dollar criminal penalty after the company was found guilty of violating the terms of the probation by falsifying ships’ logs and “illegally discharging plastic mixed with food waste in Bahamian waters.” Court-ordered oversight determined that Carnival held “a culture that seeks to minimize or avoid information that is negative, uncomfortable, or threatening to the Company, including to top leadership (i.e., the Board of Directors, C-Suite executives, and Brand Presidents/CEOs).”

In order to remedy the repeated lawbreaking, the monitor declared that “Top [Carnival] leadership must own its role in having historically fostered a culture that minimizes or avoids difficult information.” Despite the clear instructions, Carnival continued to run afoul of the law. The court-appointed monitor declared that the company held a “culture of excess frugality.”

During the multiyear probation, Carnival CEO Micky Arison was repeatedly brought before federal judge Patricia Seitz, who after multiple probation violations vented her frustration in open court. “But, Mr. Arison, this company—this is not the first criminal proceeding that this company has gone through. It’s not the second. It’s not the third. And you have been at the helm of the company throughout. I almost feel like I’m talking with a chronic drug addict in that they come in and they are all remorseful, they say the right things, but it doesn’t translate into walking the walk.”

Seventy-two ships from the Carnival Cruise Line, Princess Cruises, and Holland America Line were placed under federal court monitoring to literally clean up their act, and they needed employees to police what was being dumped into the sea, especially from the kitchens. Erin liked the job description because she could do her part to protect the oceans and keep people healthy.

In January 2020, Holland America sent Erin to a sanitation course in Miami run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She was taught the sanitation regulations, including protocols to combat disease outbreaks. With a population density akin to a prison, cruise ships were prime breeding grounds for contagious diseases, sometimes foodborne and in other cases spread from person to person. Over the years, Holland America had many outbreaks, and the Zaandam was not immune. From 2006 to 2019, the ship reported five disease outbreaks, an unusually high number.

When Erin boarded the Zaandam in early February 2020, she was assigned to supervise two dozen dishwashers and garbage workers spread among the ship’s seven kitchens. They worked in a variety of eateries, ranging from the modest crew galley on A Deck to the kitchen inside Pinnacle Grill, the ship’s high-end restaurant. The sanitation officer’s job was a demanding one. Erin was in charge of coordinating numerous health and safety protocols and assuring a web of complex systems worked to perfection as the ship cruised some of the most remote places on Earth.

In the previous month, the Zaandam had made runs to Antarctica, through the Strait of Magellan, to the far reaches of the South Atlantic, to the Falkland Islands, and beyond. Erin was confident that they’d kept the virus off this ship, and not because of some romantic trust that they were too far from the epidemic. There’d been no known cases of anything remotely like the virus, and had there been evidence, Erin Montgomery, sanitation officer, would have been among the first to know. Part of her job was to assure medical records were precise, which included strict rules for reporting any kinds of flulike illnesses. Failure to do so would expose the cruise lines to huge fines and a lot of heat from the CDC. Part of Erin’s job was to ensure that didn’t happen.

Her day, so far, had been overflowing with unpleasant tasks: She’d checked the nasty grease traps, the food-waste grinders, and the rat guards—devices designed to keep vermin from climbing up the lines to get on (or off) the ship during port calls.

Awaiting the final preparations for embarking, Erin relaxed at the Lido Deck dining area, imagining what she was going to eat for dinner. She’d gone over everything in her head, time and time again. They’d ratcheted up the protocols for disinfecting, assigning frequent wipe-downs of surfaces, including elevator buttons, and other simple tasks like that. They’d scavenged Plexiglas sheets to install along the buffet tables and assigned more stewards to serve food, as a precaution against any stray germs.

A friendly French woman, alone and in her seventies, asked if she could join Erin for dinner. The passengers were exploring their new world, and they often liked to meet the officers. As they chatted, the woman mentioned to Erin that she was feeling a little under the weather. Had she picked up a bug on the long flight from France to Argentina? A man sitting nearby on the airplane, she mentioned, had coughed nonstop during the flight. After everything they’d done on board, Erin felt confident the Zaandam was as protected as it could be from any virus.

Erin knew a disease outbreak when she saw one, and it wasn’t going to happen on her watch.

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

As the Zaandam prepared to leave Buenos Aires, the virus was still seen as a problem for the Chinese, the Italians, and the Spaniards. Global hot spots were half a world away from the Zaandam, or at least that was the opinion of Orlando Ashford, president of the Holland America Line.

Ashford was no mariner. He held decades of experience in human resources and management consulting when he was tapped to lead Holland America by Carnival CEO Arnold Donald in late 2014. Eternally smiling, Ashford knew how to talk the corporate language. He’d led Holland America through a period of astounding growth. Fiscal year 2019, with twenty billion dollars in revenue and three billion dollars in earnings, was the most profitable year ever for Carnival, and Holland America Line was a key part. Global passenger numbers had tripled, from ten million people cruising in 2004 to thirty million in 2019. Not only was cruising becoming ever more popular but a growing club of cruisers were deeply loyal to the experience, the ships, and even specific crew members. Aboard the ship, passengers and crew often spoke about how it felt like “a big family.”

Ashford understood these ships were floating resorts, and a fantasy space where hospitality reigned supreme. In the days leading up to the sailing of the Zaandam, his staff had checked with the ports, the U.S. government, the CDC. No one was prohibiting the ship from setting off. In fact, few places on Earth felt safer than South America. “We’re trying to protect and deliver a wonderful guest experience, a wonderful vacation experience. That’s what this business is engineered to do,” he explained to Bloomberg Businessweek. The government wasn’t ordering him not to sail, the ports were buzzing, and the passengers arrived in droves. The Zaandam would set sail, as planned, the afternoon of March 8. “We felt like we could deliver a great guest experience,” Ashford proclaimed.

Meanwhile, another Carnival executive, Dr. Grant Tarling, was working overtime from his offices onshore. As chief medical officer for Holland America owner Carnival Corp., he’d been dealing with severe outbreaks for over a month. At least twenty-one passengers were dead or dying from COVID-19 on Carnival ships. Hundreds more had been infected. One of the deadliest outbreaks had been on the Diamond Princess, in January in Japan, but there were others, as well.

To help passengers better understand the risks, Dr. Tarling delivered updates in cheery three- to five-minute videos that seemed aimed at easing fears of COVID-19 on a cruise. “Given recent events and general inquiries we have received about travelers’ health,” said Dr. Tarling, looking into the camera in one video released in late February, a map of the world behind him, “you may want to bring your own thermometer.” It sounded like an offhand remark, devoid of any urgency. The lead M.D. also mimicked the correct position to sneeze, bringing his bent arm close to his nose. “If you cough or sneeze, do it into a tissue or your bent elbow.” His third piece of advice was, “Buy travel insurance.” The doctor suggested passengers read the insurance coverage closely to “make sure it is the kind ‘cancel for any reason’ and covers many unexpected travel situations, such as medical care and evacuation.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Five thousand miles north of the Zaandam, in the West Wing of the White House, Olivia Troye sat in her office and pulled up a spreadsheet. Since May 2018, Olivia had worked as a homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, briefing him about bombings, natural disasters, and school shootings. Beginning in January 2020, COVID-19 outbreaks on cruise ships began to show up on her radar. And since early February, when President Trump placed Pence in charge of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, cruise ship outbreaks and how to deal with them became a growing part of Olivia’s day-to-day work. So many ships kept reporting cases that the White House needed a spreadsheet to keep track of them all. Olivia, a forty-three-year-old brunette with intense brown eyes and a passion for government service, felt overwhelmed with the logistics of bringing each and every one of these massive ships to port. Her boss also seemed swamped, and that was unnerving to her, considering he was vice president of the United States.

But for a few hours in early March, Olivia needed to help the veep focus on the latest outbreak on the Grand Princess, nearing San Francisco Bay. The vice president was just back from Port Everglades, a cruise ship hub north of Miami, where he’d met with cruise line CEOs and Florida political leaders, including Republican governor Ron DeSantis. The cruise lines had been lobbying the White House to allow them to continue operating, usually calling Pence, which meant the calls went through Olivia first. The ongoing cruise ship outbreaks had set the industry on the edge of a catastrophic financial abyss that no one could have imagined even a few weeks earlier. Epidemiologists and public health experts at the CDC were pressing to suspend cruises—all of them. The CDC, however, was under intense political pressure to hold off making an announcement until after the vice president’s meetings, but it had the legal orders ready to go, and the cruise lines were terrified. Without swift help from Pence, they knew that soon no one would be permitted to board a ship and the industry would be plunged into an unprecedented financial crisis.

Olivia wrote the talking points for Pence, expressing the administration’s unwavering support for cruising; she’d hoped Pence would like them. Watching the vice president live on CNN, she received her answer. Pence walked into a conference room at the port, flanked by politicians and government brass. As the cameras rolled, he emphasized that the White House was backing the cruise industry. “American people value our cruise line industry. It brings great joy and great entertainment value for Americans,” Pence declared. “We want to ensure Americans can continue to enjoy the opportunities of the cruise line industry.”

BUENOS AIRES

Late afternoon on March 8, after all passengers and final provisions were brought aboard the Zaandam, Claudia Osiani strolled Promenade Deck. Clouds were starting to roll across the skies above Buenos Aires, and droves of passengers lined the railings to catch a last glimpse of the magnificent city laid out below. But Claudia was trying to quash the worries that had stalked her even before this cruise began. Like all passengers, she’d filled out the cursory five-question health survey when boarding. She saw no mention of COVID-19, and despite repeated company promises to screen passengers during enhanced boarding procedures, no one had stopped her or Juan to monitor their temperatures. Maybe the virus was another of those terrestrial problems everyone could leave behind as they walked up the gangway and were greeted with trays of champagne and fine wine, a twenty-two-foot-high pipe organ in the atrium, and a sound track of classic rock tunes. Maybe she was overthinking the risks.

On the Zaandam’s high-tech bridge, Captain Ane Smit, a twenty-five-year veteran of Holland America with a soothing voice that imbued a sense of calm and security, went over his final preparations for a challenging route through some of the world’s most notoriously rough waters. His command center was loaded with electronic maps, sonar, depth finders, multiple GPS systems, and panels lined with buttons, switches, and thruster and throttle controls. Spread across several consoles, there were endless streams of data sorting out the complex operations aboard the ship.

In the medical center was Dr. Warren Hall, a South African obstetrician and the ship’s chief medical officer. They’d filled out their “formularies,” listing the medicines and medical supplies they needed for the voyage ahead, based on a master list of inventories drawn up by Holland America’s onshore medical department. Most of the cases on the Holland America ships were cardiac or trauma. Slips and falls led to frequently painful but rarely grave injuries, which was fortunate, given that the medical center on the ship was unable to deliver long-term intensive care but rather was designed more like a basic emergency room with the ability to stabilize patients in the few hours it usually took to reach port and, soon after, a proper hospital. On the rare occasion when the ship was more than twenty-four hours from port—near the Antarctic Peninsula, for example—Dr. Hall had a stock of emergency oxygen tanks to cover those crucial few hours.

Dr. Hall had one other physician aboard, Dr. Sonja Hofmann, a South African who was lead doctor for the crew. Dr. Hall would focus on guests. Between them, they shared four nurses to care for the 1,243 passengers and 586 crew members. The Zaandam carried a meager health detachment, roughly one medical provider for every three hundred people aboard the ship. The casino staffing was far more generous, with eighteen full-time employees, but in a way it all made sense. Passengers tended to flock to the casino and avoided the med center, where even a simple visit might run into the hundreds of dollars in extra charges.

One key medical item wasn’t stocked: tests for COVID-19. The corporate office had determined that tests were hard to get (and unreliable). There were a few boxes of surgical masks and a dozen oxygen tanks, enough to run the ship’s sole ventilator for about five days. The cruise line was betting that COVID-19 tests wouldn’t be necessary. “Based on the information we had, based on the commitments that we had from the ports, and based on the guests’ desire to go,” Ashford would later explain, “we had every expectation to be able to go around South America.”

Claudia Osiani and Juan Henning were dubious about their safety aboard the ship once they saw the slew of foreigners carousing and congregating. They immediately decided they would try their best to steer clear of the other guests on this trip. The couple was booked only on the first leg of the cruise, so in just thirteen days they would get off the Zaandam in Chile and take a ninety-minute flight home to Argentina. They decided to self-isolate to the degree possible aboard a cruise ship.

Down in the holds of the Zaandam, the quartermasters went over the stores for the long trip. It takes army-like logistics to keep a cruise ship supplied. Most of the nonperishable goods stacked in the Zaandam’s holds had been gathered months earlier at the cruise line’s warehouse in Miami, where supplies were packed into containers and shipped to Chile. The result was packaged in the holds in neat shrink-wrapped pallets, which were lashed down to prevent spillage during the inevitable rough seas. The bosun’s mates had been busy over the last two days in port, loading enough fresh produce and meats from the local markets for the first two-week leg of the cruise. To feed all passengers and crew on a ship like the Zaandam would typically require 130,000 pounds of vegetables, 40,000 eggs, 20,000 steaks, 16,000 cans of beer and soda, and hundreds of cases of wine. They’d topped off the Zaandam’s massive tanks at the port with hundreds of tons of diesel and bunker fuel, enough to keep it running even longer. In the overpriced gift shops, clerks were tallying the big-ticket items: Hermès scarfs, Calvin Klein suits, and twenty-two pounds of diamond jewelry worth almost a million dollars. With plans to restock fresh produce, fuel, and water along the route, these supplies would keep the ship running until it reached San Antonio, the Chilean port where the first leg of the cruise would conclude. The Zaandam was ready to set sail.

In addition to the carefully itemized manifest items, one additional traveler was aboard the ship. The crew was unaware of its presence. It was never cataloged or ordered and had not purchased a ticket. This stowaway, likely hiding in the lungs of a passenger or perhaps a crew member, was microscopic in size yet capable of overwhelming this gargantuan ship. As the Zaandam prepared to leave Buenos Aires, Holland America executives told the world that the Zaandam was immune to such threats.


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