UNMC’s Steven Hinrichs, MD, recently was named to a national panel tasked with exploring how the cruise industry can safely resume operations this fall and winter.
Dr. Hinrichs has dealt with challenges associated with infectious diseases throughout his professional life, which makes him a perfect fit for the “Healthy Sail Panel,” a group comprised of top experts in public health, infectious disease, biopreparedness, hospitality and maritime operations.
Cruise industry leaders Royal Caribbean Group and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. announced the panel, a collaboration to develop recommendations for cruise lines to advance their public health response to COVID-19, improve safety, and achieve readiness for the safe resumption of operations, earlier this summer.
The panel is co-chaired by Michael Leavitt, former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Scott Gottlieb, MD, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It also includes Julie Gerberding, MD, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was on hand in 2005 for the opening of the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit on the UNMC campus.
“This is a very challenging assignment but also an important effort,” said Dr. Hinrichs, professor and chair of the UNMC Department of Pathology and Microbiology. “The cruise line industry is a major contributor to our economy and the public health challenges and logistical challenges a cruise line faces are very complex. We think processing 1,000 COVID laboratory specimens a day is a challenge, but imagine loading 4,000 to 6,000 passengers onto a ship in four hours.”
Dr. Hinrichs said the panel has to review several hundred pages of documentation from cruise lines by mid-September. Information includes how cruise leaders would decide whether to disembark, when to implement quarantine measures, the best approaches to disinfection, how much reduced capacity they should operate with and how many intensive care beds they should they have on each ship.
Dr. Hinrichs said with the right guidelines in place, it’s possible to make vacationing on a cruise ship safe.
“With certain guidelines in place, including when masks are required and with enhanced screening, a return to business could be very feasible,” he said. “It’s been instructional to see how the various technologies can be brought to bear on a challenge this complex. There are wristbands that can be used to monitor temperature 24 hours a day, facial recognition software can be used for contact tracing, and there are technologies for touchless boarding so no paperwork is involved when people are boarding the ship.”