By ME--personally!
Red handed!
Why should I be surprised?
My ears perked up when I heard that the
upcoming story on the evening news was about
an outbreak of illness on two cruise ships.
The ships were Royal Caribbean's Legend of the Seas,
and Celebrity's Infinity.
They both pulled into Los Angeles today.
The story was that "hundreds" onboard were ill
with the dreaded norovirus.
Well...the Legend was carrying 2076 passengers.
133 were ill on the voyage.
I got out my faithful calculator.
That is 6.4%.
93.6% were not ill.
Will we have a story about them tomorrow night?
The Infinity had 2217 passengers.
100 were taken ill.
This is less than 5%.
So the "hundreds" were 233.
I guess, technically, that is hundreds.
But I certainly pictured more.
Both Royal Caribbean and Celebrity were very
aggressive in combating these outbreaks,
as we would want them to be.
But should these two events have been shown
on the prime time national news?
Must have been a slow news day.
It seems that even ABC might have had some
misgivings about the seriousness of these stories.
Just in case...they threw in a flashback to
two years ago when the Carnival ship lost
power at sea and drifted in un-air-conditioned
misery for days.
How that related to the cases of norovirus is
a mystery to me.
No it's not. It's strictly sensationalizing!
In reading reports about these recent "outbreaks"
I found the following:
"According to the Center for Disease Control,
20 million people on land in the U.S.
come down with the norovirus every year--
1 in 15.
The odds of contracting norovirus in a cruise ship
outbreak is about
1 in 12,000."
It was stated that the CDC had sent this info
to ABC News.
Funny--that wasn't mentioned!
The balloon of sensationalism might have been burst!
By the way...I've been on both of these ships,
more than once on the Legend,
and I've never had the norovirus.
Don't let media exaggeration and hype scare you
off from cruising!
As for me, I'm thinking I need to spend much more
time on cruise ships, since the odds of
contracting norovirus are sooo much less there
than on land!
No comments:
Post a Comment