CDC drops COVID-19 risk alerts for cruise travelers
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday it’s dropping the Cruise Ship Travel Health Notice, which informed travelers of coronavirus risk levels connected to cruising, after months of strong objections from cruise industry leaders.
The CDC had a four-tier risk assessment rating for cruise travel. Since cruising restarted in June 2021 after a pandemic hiatus, the U.S. agency has alternated between calling cruising a “high” risk or “very high” risk of passengers contracting COVID-19 due to surges in new coronavirus variants and recommending that travelers avoid cruises.
The announcement comes the day after the CDC said that the omicron subvariant, BA.2, is now the dominant version of the virus in the United States. While the strain has proven to be highly contagious, it has not shown to cause severe illness due to the prevalence of vaccines.
“While cruising will always pose some risk of COVID-19 transmission, travelers will make their own risk assessment when choosing to travel on a cruise ship, much like they do in all other travel settings,” the CDC said in a statement.
The agency said it would continue to provide guidance to cruise lines on COVID-19 passenger and crew safety through its voluntary COVID-19 Program for Cruise Ships. Passengers can check the CDC’s website for their ships which will be given a color code to indicate whether a ship is part of the CDC’s voluntary program, the level of vaccination among crew and passengers and other information.
Cruise industry leaders, many of whom are based in South Florida and have said they think the CDC was too harsh on cruise travel, breathed a sigh of relief.
“We’re absolutely thrilled to see that the CDC recognizes that it’s time to remove the Travel Health Notice website,” Tom McAlpin, the CEO of Virgin Voyages, said in a statement, adding “this was a long time coming.”
He called it “refreshing to see them meet us where we’re at, and clearly where our consumers are at considering the major uptick in demand we’ve seen.”
Virgin Voyages has experienced a 152% increase in cruise bookings from January through March.
The embattled cruise industry was completely shut down for over a year after COVID-19 spread like wildfire on cruise ships at the onset of the pandemic in spring of 2020. Cruising restarted in the U.S. in June 2021, but under CDC monitoring and with strict warning levels from the agency.
After the restart last summer, the CDC had lowered its COVID-19 risk warning for cruising to a level 3, denoting “high” risk of COVID-19 infections. Then by the end of 2021 amid the omicron wave, the agency boosted it back to level 4 “very high” risk and recommended travelers avoid cruise travel regardless of their vaccination status.
The heightened alert level prompted an uproar among cruise industry leaders, who said cruising was being unfairly targeted.
This story was originally published March 30, 2022 at 12:54 PM.