A Covid-19 scare is the last thing the cruise industry needs as it eases back into the Caribbean.
Yet at least one passenger on SeaDream Yacht Club’s SeaDream 1 received a preliminary positive test result for Covid-19 on Wednesday, according to Gene Sloan, a senior reporter for cruise and travel at The Points Guy, who was aboard the ship.
The ship, which was in the Grenadines at the time, immediately headed back to Barbados, where it docked that evening.
A Sea Dream Yacht Club statement released on Thursday afternoon says “guests’ tests for Covid-19 returned assumptive positive results,” indicating multiple positive results, although the company did not provide a number in the statement.
CNN has requested the exact number of positive results and is awaiting confirmation.
“The ship’s medical staff has tested all crew members and all tests have come back negative. SeaDream is currently retesting all guests,” the statement says.
Sloan told CNN’s Patrick Oppmann on Thursday that crew members told him that if all other passengers tested negative, they might be able to leave their cabins soon and then disembark from the ship in the coming days.
There are 53 passengers and 66 crew members on board, he said.
SeaDream 1 is the first cruise vessel to resume sailing in the Caribbean since the start of the pandemic.
Sloan reported that the Covid scare started when the captain informed passengers of the preliminary positive test over the ship’s intercom system shortly before lunchtime on Wednesday.
Passengers were instructed to return to their cabins and remain isolated there, he said.
The impact on the industry of the incident “will depend in part on how this situation unfolds in the coming hours and days,” Sloan told CNN Travel via email from his cabin on board. “But it’s not a great development for the cruise industry. I think the hope had been that the rigorous testing that SeaDream was doing would keep Covid off its ship.”
Extensive, multilayer testing for Covid-19 has been an integral part of SeaDream’s efforts to create a Covid-19 negative bubble aboard its ships.
Passengers were tested both in advance of traveling to the ship and also before boarding the ship, Sloan said.
“And SeaDream also was testing passengers four days into the trip,” he said. “We were scheduled to be tested again today. That’s a more rigorous testing plan than most lines had been discussing for the restarts.”
That rigor is due in part to the strict testing required by Barbados, where the ship will be based for the season, Sloan noted.
SeaDream’s winter voyages from Barbados started on November 7 with the sailing that has now been cut short.
These new Caribbean sailings follow a successful summer season for SeaDream in Norway, which the company said “resulted in zero positive cases during the entire Norwegian summer season.”
“After completing a successful summer season in Norway, we implemented even stricter health and safety protocols for our Barbados winter season. All guests were tested twice prior to embarkation and we are in the process of r-testing guests,” said SeaDream’s Andreas Brynestad in the statement released on Thursday.
Guests and nonessential crew members are isolating in their staterooms while SeaDream gets approval from the Barbados government to disembark guests.
“SeaDream is following all protocols recommended by the health authorities,” the statement says.
SeaDream’s ships, which the company refers to as “superyachts,” have 56 staterooms, with a capacity for 112 guests and 95 crew.
Carrying fewer than 250 guests outside of US waters allows SeaDream to operate outside of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s orders around cruising.
The CDC recently issued a “Framework for Conditional Sailing Order for Cruise Ships.”
The order, which applies to cruise ships in US territorial waters that have capacity to carry at least 250 passengers, is considered a tentative step toward the resumption of cruising.
Trade group Cruise Lines International Association said it will work with the CDC to resume US sailings as soon as possible, but that its members would continue a voluntary suspension of operations through the end of 2020.
Photo from SeaDream Yacht Club. CNN’s Patrick Oppmann and Tamara Hardingham-Gill contributed to this report.
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