HOW SAFE IS CRUISING?

According to research compiled by the Dasit Law Firm, cruise ships have the lowest rate of deaths per billion passenger miles with 0.08.

• Rail travel  11.9
• Cars  3.3
• Commercial air travel  0.8.
• In other words, cruise travel is 10 time safer than air travel!

In a span of a decade between 2002 and 2013, 356 people were killed on cruise ships, with 32 of them aboard the Costa Concordia, which sank.  Of course there are injuries, and falling is the most common.  But that study was made in 2016 BEFORE covid.

We are all familiar with the Diamond Princess outbreak early in 2020, which was the most prominent early warning of something terrible coming.

• 3711 passengers and crew.
• 712 infections:  19%.
• 14 deaths:  0.4%.

It's difficult to compare this number with the above statistics, because the latter is per billion passenger miles.  In general:

• It is reported that there is a rough average of 200 deaths on cruise ships/year.  For roughly 30 million passengers, that is one death for every 150,000 guests.
• In 2020 67 died of covid on cruise ships.
• 7 million cruised in 2020, so the odds of dying after boarding a cruise ship was one in 104,448.  Mind you, the pandemic began early in 2020.
• So far there have been 6,837,933 deaths from covid in the world,  Divided by the world population of 8 billion, there was a one chance in 1170 of you dying from this disease. 
•  However, in the USA, it is one chance in 289.  
• Compare this to the one in 104,448 chance of dying on a cruise ship, and it is certainly safer to cruise than stay at home.
• But you say, wait a minute, this pandemic has been with us for more than three years now, while the average cruise is only a week long.  So there has been 160 weeks since the pandemic began, thus dividing by this number gives 653, which is still more than twice as safe being on a cruise than staying at home in the U.S.
• Keep in mind that people in 2020 had not yet been vaccinated.  I couldn't find any report of covid deaths on cruise ships in 2021-2023, but the following example probably shows that the death rate because of vaccination requirements and negative tests before boarding mean that there are few deaths.
• 
  In November of 2022, the Majestic Princess, with 4600 passengers, docked in Sydney, Australia with 800 covid cases.  All were asymptomatic, or mildly so.  I guess no one died.  This was not the only ship with this problem, which is why Australia has been so strict about being tested just before boarding a cruise.  And this is why with the current outbreak on the Seabourn Odyssey, the odds are very high that we will get to Honolulu alive.

A more recent article, HOW SAFE IS FLYING IN 2023, indicates the following.

• Flying is the safest form of long-distance transportation, without mentioning cruising.

• Note there is a waterborne segment, which is equal to aviation.  However, nothing is mentioned in this article, and I suspect that the water-deaths are from smaller craft.  Note that vehicular travel is dangerous.
• Went on to say (but this is in deaths/one million flights).
• Aircraft fatality dropped to 0.11 in 2022.
• It was 0.23 in 2021.
• The 5-year running average was 0.13
• This was a marked improvement of the 1980's, when this figure was 0.37 to 0.52.
• 2017 was the safest year with 59 fatalities.
• 905 died in 2006 and 943 in 2010.
• In 2022 there were 229 deaths, 132 from a single China Eastern flight.  Calculating the fatality risk gave that number of 0.11.  A person would need to take a flight every day for 25,214 years to experience death.

• 
  As an aside, the odds of dying from food poisoning are one in 3 million.  As your being killed in a plane crash are about 1 in 11 million, you should be a lot more concerned about eating than flying...or the plane food.
• Oh, finally about flying, if your plane crashes, statistics show that 95.7% of passengers survive that rare accident.

One final threat, the mythical rogue wave.  Call them freak, monster or killer, these waves are unpredictable and suddenly appear, of great danger to all ships, including cruise liners.  Technically a rogue wave is more precisely defined as one whose height is more than twice the average height of the existing waves.  

Similarly there are rogue holes, where the depth can reach twice average wave height.  While confirmed in wave tanks, no one has seen one in the real world.

The first confirmation of a rogue wave....

• ....occurred only in 1984 on the Gore platform in the North Sea, a 36-foot wave suddenly hit during relatively calm seas.  
• There was another on the Draupner platform in 1995 that had a recorded wave height of 84 feet.  
• In 2000 a British oceanographic research vessel, the RRS Discovery, sailing west of Scotland, encountered a wave of 95 feet.  
• It has been calculated that 10 rogue waves exist in the world's ocean at any moment.
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a catalogue of 50 historical incidents associated with rogue waves. 
• 
  Historically, in 1942 a 92 foot wave broadsided the RMS Queen Mary, where the ship listed about 52 degrees before slowly righting, and in 1995 Queen Elizabeth 2 encountered a 95 foot wave during Hurricane Luis.
• In 2004 in the Gulf of Mexico during Hurricane Ivan, a wave as high as 130 feet was suspected in the eyewall.  

So how safe is cruising?  Today, even with covid, cruising is probably 10 times safer than flying...and you saw above how safe it is to fly.

By the way, I still worry about my well-being, appreciating that exercise is important to maintain good health.  What do I do when there is an outbreak, and our floor in particular has the most cases?  Plus, the past few days there has a been a plumbing problem, and staff have been actively trying to clean the hallway and some rooms.  More than half of the walking area is sort of blocked off with blowers drying the rug.  While this hastens the recovery, covid is a respiratory disease, and several of those cabins have people so infected, thus probably spreading the viruses into the air.

In short, can't walk in the hallway anymore.  I could go to another floor but they too are not totally safe.  I can try outside, but the ship has many sail days, and the seas are rough.  It is difficult to just walk in your room.  I am afraid of the wellness center to use the cross-trainer or weights or treadmill because everything is in an enclosed room.  What to do, what to do.

I found a solution.  For the first time yesterday, I lightly jogged and danced in place.  Right next to the bed with loud music from my iPhone beamed to a blue-ray speaker.  Went first for 15 minutes, and my pedometer gained 800 steps.  Rested a bit, then another 20 minutes.  The seas were rough, but I did not once need to fall on the bed. The pedometer provides a gauge, but does not count moving in place.  Somehow, it is smart enough to know whether I'm moving in some direction.  If I keep this up daily, I'll be okay.

Otherwise, slept to 10AM, so my first real meal was Easter Brunch at an outside aft table of the Colonnade.  My usual champagne and rosé wine.  A large salad and assortment of stuff.

The sea was rough, but energizing.

I found my solution to exercise described above during the afternoon.  Dinner was room service.  Truffle Risotto with Poached Egg, Baby Spinach with Duck Confit, Romaine Salad and Pan fried Veal Sweetbreads, with red wine and beer.  Also lamb and scallops.

Watched King Richard, which got sterling 90/98 scores from Rotten Tomatoes.  Indeed, was perhaps the best film we have thus far watched on this ship during dinner.  All about Wil Smith as Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena.  Smith earned an Academy Award nomination for best actor, but Aunjanue Ellis was particularly uplifting as the mother.

Got some Easter egg candy for dessert.

Only 1603 steps, but still did some exercising by jogging/dancing in place.  I'll need to see how I can increase the steps by moving in a way that triggers the count.

-