On the Boat
Posted on March 7, 2020 Posted by John Scalzi 20 Comments
Another year, another JoCo Cruise! I’ll be updating the site while I’m on the boat… but not a whole lot. Because I’ll be busy, you know, having a vacation. And before you ask, don’t worry, I’m washing my hands and the whole ship is sanitized. We’ll be fine. It’s you all who should be careful. I want there still to be a country when I come back, please. Thanks.
Have fun! We would prefer you not getting stuck in quarantine, although boredom might lead you to writing a whole new book…
The risk is, primarily, to the rest of the country, after you all get back to your various points of origin. If you don’t protect against low probability infections at the beginning of an epidemic, you tend to lose control pretty quickly.
Good luck. I hope they checked the passengers and crew before you all boarded, because you do NOT want to be stuck in limo on a Ship of Fools, especially now that the Fool in Chief is trying to stop the ship in California from landing, thereby making sure the infection spreads to more and more people. I must admit, cruising never interested me (and my wife is a terrible ‘sailor’), but recent years’ headlines and now this…sorry, not gonna get on a ship and you can’t make me.
Just be careful.
Don’t worry about us. Mike Pence has everything under control. Unless, there’s an HIV epidemic we’ll be fine.
Just googled it and read the article in https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/travel/joco-cruise-jonathan-coulton.html by John Schwartz (one of my favorite reporters — he got a story about one of my wins spot on!). Looks like great fun! Never heard of such a thing, but there should be more like it.
Stupid. Just because The Great Leader is against?
Wait … I just got it. You are on the JOCO cruise.
Um …. I guess if you get stuck on the boat, you will:
1) be around some awesome people
2) get to write about it.
please don’t get sick
Safe travels, John!
I hope you have a great time. I also hope your ship isn’t quarantined and that you and everybody else are safe. I love to watch cosplay, but that density of them might be hard to take.
Holland America Line again? A high-school friend of mine was on the Westerdam last month. It left Hong Kong on Feb 1 and then was not allowed to dock by Japan, Taiwan, Guam (US), the Philippines, and Thailand. They roamed the South Pacific for two weeks before being allowed into port by Cambodia. Everyone debarked and scattered to head home, only to have a passenger test positive for the coronavirus.
I read an interview with my friend on NPR and sent him an email; he answered from Dubai where he was making a connection. The test result came out later, and I really wondered if he and the other passengers were going to be slammed into quarantine all over the world. Fortunately, the test turned out to be a false positive.
The Westerdam is now sailing to Juneau with no passengers, to start doing Alaska cruises. We were on one, on that ship, about 10 years ago. I have to say that right now I’d hesitate about getting into an elevator with 2-3 people, let alone a ship with 2-3 thousand.
I work in a nursing home and I am over 60 so if we get it we are doomed. Most of my residents would probably die because they are very fragile and I probably wouldn’t fare well because I smoked for over 40 yrs and even though I don’t anymore (9 years) the damage has probably already been done.
I said to one of my coworkers this morning half jokingly “I wonder if this is how I go out”.
God bless science. Instead of panicking and screaming, Scalzi and his peers can see their crew doing scientific sanitizing. Works for me.
There was a time when people couldn’t grasp that the AIDS virus would swiftly die if exposed on the sidewalk, or realize that poison gas, as predicted in that 19th century Martian invasion novel, moves downhill. Into shell craters. I stick with science.
Well, John doesn’t drink, so he’ll advocate using all the booze to wash down the ship; many of the other passengers, bored and cranky, protest violently. Civil war breaks out on the ship. Chaos ensues as the crew fail to quell the rioting. Finally the test results come back negative for Covid-19 and people are allowed to disembark. There are 17 survivors, all in a state of deep shock. One screaming middle-aged maniac must be sedated and bundled in a straight jacket; he is led off the ship mumbling fuck! fuck! fuck!…
Naahh, never happen ;-)
Going on a cruise is a great idea when the time zones flip to DST from STD (in my case EDT).
The day it happens, well, everyone seems to be in a really crappy mood.
Like me.
I bet it would never happen if it were declared a paid public holiday.
I wonder how many of the people panicking over COVID-19 are the same people who won’t vaccinate their kids for measles, or get their flu shots every year.
Also, COVID-19 scare on cruise ship leads to extended JOCO Cruise in quarantine? That doesn’t sound that bad, actually. Well, we want you back writing here, so maybe instead Best Wishes for a safe and healthy cruise.
Hope you have some reading material if you are stuck in quarantine!
Granny: The people who are “panicking” over COVID-19 are basically the ones who are “panicked”* by anti-vaxxers who put others are risk. The problem in both cases is that if appropriate public health measures are successful, they encourage complacency – and if they fail, the ones responsible for the failure aren’t the ones who actually wind up seriously ill as a result.
* A better term: concerned
If I’m John, then I’m a smart guy. So a smart guy knows that 1) he probably won’t get it, 2) being stuck in quarantine is not life-disrupting for him (he can’t lose his job) 3) and even if he does get sick, if he’s one of the unfortunate few that need intensive medical care, he’ll also be one of the fortunate few who got sick before we ran out of hospital beds. So yeah, why not?
As a welcome home gift, I’ve pre-ordered The Last Emperox. Had to spell it for the clerk. Have a wonderful time!
My sister and her family are taking a cruise next week for March Break. They are taking a large thing of hand sanitizer, and plan to take precautions, but otherwise will be having fun. She works in the labs at Health Canada, so she’s pretty up on the proper responses.