Will a Whole Year Have Gone by Before the US Cruises Again?

The concept of time was invented by the Egyptians back in 1500 BC. No truth to the rumor it was developed because the Pharaoh had a flight delayed.

In all seriousness, time is our ultimate measuring stick. Either we have too much of it on our hands or we never have enough of it, but it’s how we track our lives.

So it seems almost unbelievable that after today’s news – and, what we suspect will be further news – it will be almost a full year before someone in the U.S. can board a ship and take a cruise.

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. (and partner lines Oceania Cruises and Regent Seven Seas Cruises) and sister lines Royal Caribbean International and Celebrity Cruises announced they have further canceled all sailings through Feb. 28, 2021.

The growing second surge of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as cruise ship companies working to meet the requirements of the Framework for Conditional Sailing Order issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, contributed to the decision. Now we wait on Carnival and other cruise lines to likely do the same.

A year.

By the time some of these ships arrived in Miami and Fort Lauderdale and Tampa and Port Canaveral and New York and New Jersey and Baltimore and Galveston and New Orleans and Los Angeles – all ports that rely on and support the cruise industry – it will be pushing a full year since cruise lines have sailed out of American ports. It was roughly mid-March of 2020 when the Cruise Lines International Association suspended worldwide cruise passenger operations.

And while many would like to continue to be optimistic, the pragmatist wonders: Will it be even longer than 2021 when cruise lines pull away from U.S. docks again?

There is much to consider there, starting with the fact that while pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna have developed two different vaccines for the prevention of COVID-19 that could start being delivered by Christmas – and a third on the way from AstraZeneca – it will be months before the entire general public is inoculated.

There is a hard and fast protocol of who gets the vaccine first, starting with first responders, frontline healthcare workers and nursing home patients. And both the Pfizer and Moderna versions of the drug will need two doses. Some have speculated it might take until deep into the summer before everybody who wants one can get one. That would certainly cause some to pause before giving the green light to cruise again.

And there’s always the uncertainty of intervention by the U.S. government. The CDC has shown it is skittish about allowing cruise ships back on the water and has already been overruled once by The White House regarding the no-sail order. But the incoming Democratic administration of President-Elect Joe Biden is – this is weird to say – more conservative and cautious about how to handle the virus.

In fact, a pair of Democratic Senators recently sent a letter to the Centers for Disease Control, appealing to the agency to reinstate its ‘no sail order’ that would prohibit cruises from sailing in U.S. waters.

The no-sail order expired on Oct. 31, and the CDC instituted a ‘Conditional Sailing Order’ that allowed cruise lines to return to the seas under a phased plan.

Sens. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) and Doris Matsui (Calif.) told CDC Director Robert Redfield in a letter that cruising “is simply unsafe during a global pandemic” that has already killed 243,000 Americans.

One year.

This is what we are looking at right now when it comes to the cruise industry in the U.S., a measure of time so sobering that we should begin to abide by the cliché: Hope For The Best, Prepare For The Worst.