A Carnival Corp cruiseship that called at Sydney on 8 March with 158 sick passengers onboard is being blamed for spreading coronavirus.
A total of 2,700 passengers were allowed to disembark from the 113,500-gt Ruby Princess (built 2008) at the Sydney cruise terminal, and the same number joined to sail to New Zealand.
Prior to arriving in Sydney, New South Wales (NSW), 158 passengers had reported being ill, including a number with coronavirus-like symptoms.
The ship, operated by Carnival's Princess Cruises subsidiary, returned to Australia's biggest city from New Zealand on 19 March and all passengers were again allowed to disembark.
Three passengers reported to hospital with flu-like symptoms and one crew member was isolated on the ship. All four later tested positive for coronavirus, including a woman who died in hospital.
Since then, 133 passengers who sailed on the ship have tested positive for Covid-19 in Australia.
A Princess Cruises spokesman said the company had acted correctly.
'Rigorous' effort
“Our onboard medical team was rigorous in its treatment of some guests who reported flu-like symptoms, and these guests were isolated,” he said
“The ship reported these cases to NSW Health, which in turn requested swabs to be provided following the ship’s arrival in Sydney, some of which subsequently tested positive for Covid-19.”
The focus has turned to why NSW Health allowed the passengers to disembark and travel onward from the ship twice in Sydney despite reported illness among passengers.
NSW chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant was quoted as saying the Ruby Princess had been checked in New Zealand before returning to Sydney and no cases of Covid-19 had been detected. She said there was “no action that NSW Health could have taken to prevent those people acquiring the disease”.
“If we had had any suspicion, we would have deployed health teams,” she added. “Of course, with hindsight, we would have acted differently, had we known we had a Covid-positive cruiseship.”
