Re: Chinese Coronavirus
Thinking this will cripple the cruising industry and likely other industries. Perhaps that's the intention ?!
A Costa cruise ship is stuck in Italy after a Chinese woman, 54, showed symptoms and had been put in isolation alongside her husband and both of them tested for coronavirus.
It has taken a few days for the medics to conduct tests to see if she had the virus. In the meantime the Italian port authorities refused permission for passengers to go ashore. That's 6000 passengers and 1000 staff unable to go ashore just because they had to follow testing protocols for someone who had a fever.
In the last few hours it has been confirmed that it wasn't Coronavirus and the passengers are being allowed to disembark.
However the implications here are clear imo. EVERY SINGLE CRUISE sees a number of passengers present with various cold/flu like symptoms and fevers. Every single one. So what are they going to do now?
Immediately isolate any passenger that has a sniffle and then effectively stop the entire ship's company and passengers from getting off at ports until the days of testing go by and the affected passenger is cleared?
Make no mistake this is an absolute crisis for all cruise lines and for port authorities. It's going to lead to massive loss of revenue as people cancel their cruises in droves. Not because they fear catching the virus, but because it's a nailed on certainty that people will have cold viruses which display the same symptoms as Coronavirus and so they will get isolated and the cruise itinerary will be impacted for all other passengers. I doubt that the cruise lines would even compensate passengers for loss of ports under these circumstances. This could cripple cruise lines and see lesser ones go bust imo.
Carnival Cruise Lines are the largest in the world and encompass 7 or more well known cruise lines including Cunard, P&O, Princess and others. Their share price has already tanked about 20% and will imo continue to plummet.
If anyone has shares in any companies related to travel, airlines, cruising, holiday operators and so on then personally I would sell them as quickly as possible. There will be opportunities later on to buy shares at crushed prices and make significant profits once the Coronavirus problem goes away.
Article on the Costa ship in Italy
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ronavirus.html