Nearly 70 Celebrity Cruises guests sick in norovirus outbreak
Nearly 70 Celebrity Cruises passengers got sick in a norovirus outbreak during a recent cruise.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 68 of Celebrity Summit’s 2,264 guests reported being ill during a cruise that ended on Friday, along with five crew members. Their main symptoms were diarrhea and vomiting.
The ship is currently sailing week-long Alaska voyages between Vancouver and Seward, according to CruiseMapper. In response to the outbreak, the cruise line isolated sick guests and crew and collected samples for testing, among other steps, the health agency said.
There were an isolated number of cases on board and the impacted guests are no longer on the ship, according to Nathaniel Derrenbacher, a spokesperson for Celebrity’s parent company Royal Caribbean Group. Summit was also sanitized.
The news follows another norovirus outbreak on Celebrity Constellation in January that left nearly 100 guests sick. The CDC has logged seven outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness on cruises that met its threshold for public notification so far this year. Norovirus was listed as the causative agent in all but one.
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The illness is frequently associated with cruise ships, but those outbreaks account for just 1% of all outbreaks reported, according to the CDC. Dr. Sarah E. Hochman, a hospital epidemiologist and the section chief of infectious diseases at NYU Langone Health’s Tisch Hospital, told USA TODAY in April that those happen in communities on land, too.
“There's not something special or unique about cruise ships,” she said at the time. “It's really any type of congregate setting, but it's also happening out in the community on a much smaller scale among households and household contacts. It just doesn't come to the attention of public health as much as it does for larger congregate settings.”
Nathan Diller is a consumer travel reporter USA TODAY based in Nashville. You can reach him at ndiller@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Nearly 70 Celebrity cruise passengers sick with norovirus
