Covid-19 has fostered a strong level of industry-wide collaboration in the effort to eradicate it.

In June, Royal Caribbean Group and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings joined forces to form a Healthy Sail Panel focused on ensuring that health plans given to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encapsulate best insights on health, science and engineering.

The group, which is led by former Utah governor Mike Leavitt and physician Dr Scott Gottlieb as co-chairmen, was due to offer initial recommendations by the end of August as an "open-source" collaboration.

Other industry stakeholders have formed similar collaborations.

Finnish naval architecture company Foreship has devised Project Hygiea, an initiative that seeks to limit the presence and spread of the coronavirus and other pathogens on passengerships in order to get the cruise sector back up and running.

It combines Foreship’s vessel-design expertise with the knowledge of medical professionals and other industry stakeholders to formulate a strategy to tackles the crisis.

While Covid-19 was the catalyst for the project, its goal is to address the spread of any virus, including the norovirus stomach virus that has been an issue for the cruise sector for many years.

Mattias Jorgensen, vice president of business development at Foreship, said Project Hygiea started as an internal initiative to analyse how the pandemic would affect a vessel from a naval architect’s point of view.

“When we started analysing it internally, we quickly realised that this is something that other people would also benefit from as well, which is why we turned it into an external type of sharing platform,” Jorgensen said.

He insisted that industry collaboration and sharing of information is the only solution in combating the pandemic.

In fact, Jorgensen said the collaboration needs to extend to government authorities and classification societies.

“Government guidance is going to be key because the safety of the passengers is the absolute highest priority for everybody," he said.

"A unified approach for the industry is something that will be extremely important, and I think government bodies will have a major stake in that because they will be the ones lifting the no-sail order. The responsibility weighs heavily on them to say this is what they will or will not approve.”

Collaboration with classification societies is also important, and Jorgensen sees class and naval architects as complementing each other.

“What they are actually certifying are the processes on board that will come as a result of what we are doing, which is looking at the baseline and analysing what can be done,” he said.