Will vaccines now be required?

[cruisemom42]

57 minutes ago, nomad098 said:

I have no problem with the need for vaccine passports I just don't think it will be as easy as some people seem to think it will be.

 

I don't think it will be so difficult. Initially there may be a few competing "passport" technologies but I'm sure it will standardize quickly.

 

Just look at all the people who said we couldn't possibly have a COVID vaccine in less than 5 years...

[TeeRick]

Whatever technology is adopted it will need to prevent internet-based sham companies from providing people with fake vaccine documents.  You can just see this coming......

[Arizona Wildcat]

9 hours ago, zanderblue said:

 

I was tested last month at my first appointment for the Novavax vaccine trial. I was notified by email and sms text confirming my result.

Text.  Actually faster with text msg.  For vaccine easy.  They simply hand you the CDC or WHO card right then.  You bring card to second dose and they update.

[Arizona Wildcat]

15 hours ago, NutsAboutGolf said:

 

You're welcome to research on your own; the 90-95% is a myth as it only counts those who displayed symptoms, it didn't count those who were asymptotic.  Even if it was 95% effective, that still means 1 out of 20 isn't immune unfortunately and the ports may take issue with that.

 

 

Actually no.  All participants in the Moderna test were tested several times.  Pfizer in their announcement said most of those that tested COVID positive had minor to no symptoms.

Seems you might want to stick to golf until COVID completely 100% gone in 10 or 20 years

[cangelmd]

14 hours ago, NutsAboutGolf said:

 

You're welcome to research on your own; the 90-95% is a myth as it only counts those who displayed symptoms, it didn't count those who were asymptotic.  Even if it was 95% effective, that still means 1 out of 20 isn't immune unfortunately and the ports may take issue with that.

 

 

Please don’t institute panic!. The questions you are asking may never be answered with the degree of certainty your question implies.

There are mathematical ways of determining when it will be safe to not mask in public spaces. Unfortunately, the recommendations  could be situation dependent and cruising, like nursing homes, may be one of the last places to get the no mask green light. One datapoint that goes into those calculations is the number of people vaccinated, so it will be a moving target. Meanwhile, studies of the effect of the vaccine on asymptomatic spread are ongoing, but those are hard because people have to be tested so much. It will be easier to just watch the direction of reported tests, hospitalizations and deaths in the community and calculate mathematically the impact of vaccination.
 

 

Think about this, I have a friend, late 30s, worked in healthcare her whole working life, who cannot demonstrate an immune response to rubella vaccine. She’s had at least 4 or 5 MMRs, been tested dozens of times - it is rare for us to find a person who is rubella negative, so her serum is very useful when we need to validate or troubleshoot rubella testing. She has never had rubella that she remembers - rubella can cause severe birth defects and fetal loss, so for a woman of childbearing age to be nonimmune and work in healthcare is a big deal. Is she actually immune? Probably, but we can’t prove it. If she isn’t herself immune, she’s protected by herd immunity. But what about having children or being cleared to work? See the parallels to Covid and the questions that will still come up even with the best vaccine? How does she get to work? Every time she changes jobs (and she has at least twice I know of), she gets another round of MMR, and then no one worries about it after that. Her feeling safe enough to have children would be a personal decision, but most women in her situation wouldn’t even know they lacked immunity, she knows because she has to get tested when she changes jobs. That’s what herd immunity in part is for.

[WrittenOnYourHeart]

18 hours ago, ipeeinthepool said:

A question for anyone that has taken a Covid test.  Has anyone every received written confirmation of your results?  I only received a phone call.  I would think that all of the testing clinics are too busy to provide a written report so I could cruise within the next day or two after the results are back.

 

I've always gotten results on a patient portal for either the clinic or the lab.

[ECCruise]

1 hour ago, TeeRick said:

Whatever technology is adopted it will need to prevent internet-based sham companies from providing people with fake vaccine documents.  You can just see this coming......

See:  Fake "Service Dog" IDs available, e.g., on Amazon.

[terrydtx]

1 hour ago, ECCruise said:

See:  Fake "Service Dog" IDs available, e.g., on Amazon.

Interesting, on our HAL Alaska cruise in 2019, a person with a so called "service" dog was denied boarding because she did not have  proper and pre-approved service dog certification. She pitched a huge fit but was not allowed to board in Vancouver. Why anyone would want to take their pooch on a cruise boggles my mind.

[lostchild]

If the cruise line is requiring vaccine to board, it is not there to protect you.  You are already mostly protected if you are vaccinated.  It is really there to protect the cruise line.   It is so easy to fake vaccination documents.   I know many parents here in California has fake ones so their kids could go to school.   I look at my kid's vaccination paper and I could print one out just like it with my $50 printer.   And the school or cruise line cannot call to check because of patient privacy law here in California.

 

I am not saying that the cruise line can't 100% check that everyone is vaccinated.  They probably could, but that's not really their goal.  They are just creating an outlet in case something does happened, then they could say we tried, it is not our fault that someone faked documentation.

[lostchild]

1 hour ago, ECCruise said:

See:  Fake "Service Dog" IDs available, e.g., on Amazon.

 

You can get a "real" service dog tag really easily here in California.  I know many people got one for their dog so they could take them into shopping malls.   Californians love their dogs. 

[terrydtx]

1 hour ago, lostchild said:

If the cruise line is requiring vaccine to board, it is not there to protect you.  You are already mostly protected if you are vaccinated.  It is really there to protect the cruise line.

I have to disagree. If  non vaccinated passengers are allowed to board and only one of them brings Covid with them, the cruise could be cancelled, shortened or quarantined anytime during the cruise. This would then affect all who wisely chose to be vaccinated. Look what happened back in March and April to cruise ships with Covid outbreaks.

Edited November 29, 2020 by terrydtx

[OceanCruise]

IMO, this is becoming a very slippery slope. Tuberculosis kills more people annually than Covid yet a TB test or X-ray is not a prerequisite to fly or cruise. Influenza mortality rate in children is much higher than Covid so, should annual flu shots be mandatory too? Will citizens have to "show their papers" to grocery shop, go to the gym, go on a bus, etc.? Positive Covid case numbers are also very misleading. If you take the time to actually look at the graphs of official data in various states (Google: Covid dashboard state of ....), you will often find that as the rate of positive cases has gone up, the mortality rate has actually gone down (is inversely proportional). Scientific data regarding viral shedding shows that PRC tests processed beyond 34 cycles will pick up minute specks of dead, inactive virus that do not cause active infection but will still be labeled a "positive case." Labs such as Quest are processing Covid tests at 40 cycles which is why so many people test positive but have no symptoms.

[terrydtx]

19 minutes ago, OceanCruise said:

IMO, this is becoming a very slippery slope. Tuberculosis kills more people annually than Covid yet a TB test or X-ray is not a prerequisite to fly or cruise. Influenza mortality rate in children is much higher than Covid so, should annual flu shots be mandatory too? Will citizens have to "show their papers" to grocery shop, go to the gym, go on a bus, etc.? Positive Covid case numbers are also very misleading. If you take the time to actually look at the graphs of official data in various states (Google: Covid dashboard state of ....), you will often find that as the rate of positive cases has gone up, the mortality rate has actually gone down (is inversely proportional). Scientific data regarding viral shedding shows that PRC tests processed beyond 34 cycles will pick up minute specks of dead, inactive virus that do not cause active infection but will still be labeled a "positive case." Labs such as Quest are processing Covid tests at 40 cycles which is why so many people test positive but have no symptoms.

I do not know where you get your facts, but according to the TBFacts.org website only 22,200 adults died from TB in all of the Americas in 2019. That number includes North, Central and all of South America. That number is less than 10% of the total number of Covid deaths in just the United States. The 2019 TB deaths in the United States was 617 of the 22,200 in all of the Americas.. The highest TB mortality rates are in South East Asia and Africa. Travel to some of these highest TB areas requires vaccination for TB. Covid can not be compared to TB.

Edited November 29, 2020 by terrydtx

[Blackduck59]

24 minutes ago, OceanCruise said:

IMO, this is becoming a very slippery slope. Tuberculosis kills more people annually than Covid yet a TB test or X-ray is not a prerequisite to fly or cruise. Influenza mortality rate in children is much higher than Covid so, should annual flu shots be mandatory too? Will citizens have to "show their papers" to grocery shop, go to the gym, go on a bus, etc.? Positive Covid case numbers are also very misleading. If you take the time to actually look at the graphs of official data in various states (Google: Covid dashboard state of ....), you will often find that as the rate of positive cases has gone up, the mortality rate has actually gone down (is inversely proportional). Scientific data regarding viral shedding shows that PRC tests processed beyond 34 cycles will pick up minute specks of dead, inactive virus that do not cause active infection but will still be labeled a "positive case." Labs such as Quest are processing Covid tests at 40 cycles which is why so many people test positive but have no symptoms.

 

Good thing you're by the beach, the sand will be soft to dig.

Part of the But, But, But squad. Good luck to you.

[OceanCruise]

30 minutes ago, terrydtx said:

I do not know where you get your facts, but according to the TBFacts.org website only 22,200 adults died from TB in all of the Americas in 2019. That number includes North, Central and all of South America. That number is less than 10% of the total number of Covid deaths in just the United States. The 2019 TB deaths in the United States was 617 of the 22,200 in all of the Americas.. The highest TB mortality rates are in South East Asia and Africa. Travel to some of these highest TB areas requires vaccination for TB. Covid can not be compared to TB.

• A total of 1.4 million people died from TB in 2019 (including 208 000 people with HIV). Worldwide, TB is one of the top 10 causes of death and the leading cause from a single infectious agent (above HIV/AIDS).

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis

[OceanCruise]

Also from WHO:

"About one-quarter of the world's population has a TB infection, which means people have been infected by TB bacteria but are not (yet) ill with the disease and cannot transmit it.

People infected with TB bacteria have a 5–15% lifetime risk of falling ill with TB."

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis

[SevenSeas1492]

22 hours ago, ipeeinthepool said:

A question for anyone that has taken a Covid test.  Has anyone every received written confirmation of your results?  I only received a phone call.  I would think that all of the testing clinics are too busy to provide a written report so I could cruise within the next day or two after the results are back.

Yes, I received written confirmation of my negative test about 3 days after the test. Had it done at CVS.

[phoenix_dream]

On 11/28/2020 at 3:49 PM, ipeeinthepool said:

A question for anyone that has taken a Covid test.  Has anyone every received written confirmation of your results?  I only received a phone call.  I would think that all of the testing clinics are too busy to provide a written report so I could cruise within the next day or two after the results are back.

I've had two tests (thankfully both negative) from two different places. In one case I got a phone call.  In another case I did get an email which connected me to a linked site where it stated my results.  

[nocl]

21 hours ago, NutsAboutGolf said:

 

You're welcome to research on your own; the 90-95% is a myth as it only counts those who displayed symptoms, it didn't count those who were asymptotic.  Even if it was 95% effective, that still means 1 out of 20 isn't immune unfortunately and the ports may take issue with that.

 

 

 

20 hours ago, NutsAboutGolf said:

 

Perhaps one day the vaccine will one day be 100%.  To come to the 95%, they simply did not test everyone, only those who displayed symptoms.  The FDA will report an effective % less 95%, anyone is welcome to doubt the FDA and believe the vaccine is 95-100% effective.

As someone that spent 10+ years working for FDA and another 10+ working in the pharmaceutical industry I will make the following points.

 

1. The FDA approved the trial criteria that used symptomatic disease as and end point.  They did so because there is no easy way to check a large trial population for asymptomatic illness due to a current lack of known disease biomarkers that can be easily checked.

 

2. The FDA uses the same raw data set that the pharmaceutical company used to generate its analysis.  The FDA runs its own analysis independently, but uses the same data.  As such it really should not change much as long as the company stuck to the criteria as defined in the protocol.  As such one would expect the FDA analysis to be 95% as well.  After all the end point for the trial was symptomatic illness and the efficacy by either party (company or regulatory authority) is against that criteria.

 

The vaccine may very well prevent infection and transmission.  Blood work was taken during some of the trials that could provide answers about the potential of serology biomarkers.  If such biomarkers are validated than those blood tests could provide a retrospective analysis on the infection rate. They could not be used as a primary end point of the trial because serology biomakers have not been validated. 

[nocl]

7 hours ago, TeeRick said:

You should go get an antibody test to see if you had it.  For $10 you can do this at any Labcorp in the US.

Of course keep in mind that antibody tests do have about a 5% false positive rate so one should not change behavior even if they get a positive test result showing prior infection.

[ECCruise]

Gotta love those with the but but but....TB, slippery slopes, statistics subject to analysis.

 

Ya either gonna be vaccinated or ya ain't getting on a cruise ship anytime in the next year or more.  I've had to have my Yellow Fever card a number of times in the past to do specific travel.  Not a big deal.  Get over it.

 

Otherwise, enjoy your home.

[phoenix_dream]

2 hours ago, OceanCruise said:

IMO, this is becoming a very slippery slope. Tuberculosis kills more people annually than Covid yet a TB test or X-ray is not a prerequisite to fly or cruise. Influenza mortality rate in children is much higher than Covid so, should annual flu shots be mandatory too? Will citizens have to "show their papers" to grocery shop, go to the gym, go on a bus, etc.? Positive Covid case numbers are also very misleading. If you take the time to actually look at the graphs of official data in various states (Google: Covid dashboard state of ....), you will often find that as the rate of positive cases has gone up, the mortality rate has actually gone down (is inversely proportional). Scientific data regarding viral shedding shows that PRC tests processed beyond 34 cycles will pick up minute specks of dead, inactive virus that do not cause active infection but will still be labeled a "positive case." Labs such as Quest are processing Covid tests at 40 cycles which is why so many people test positive but have no symptoms.

There is so much wrong with this thinking I barely know where to start.  First, Covid has already killed more people so far this year than TB has, and the year is not over.   But more importantly by a long shot is that the vast majority of TB cases are not in countries whose populations fill cruise ships.  So the odds of catching TB on a cruise ship are very, very low. 

 

Yes, more children die from flu than from Covid, but the numbers are still small (and I am not saying in any way shape or form that any child death is acceptable of course!).  For that matter, I for one would be fine with cruise lines potentially requiring flu shots for children.  But at the same time, it must be considered that flu and Covid have very different transmission rates. How many cruise sailings do you know of that have been halted and left to flounder at sea because of a flu outbreak onboard?  I could be wrong, but I certainly don't recall any, particularly with a major line.  Additionally, when you have the flu you KNOW you have the flu - that is often not the case with Covid.  You can have it and not know it while spreading it voraciously onboard.  So that is truly comparing apples to oranges.

 

Some of what you state about mortality rate may hold some merit.  But another major factor in death rates declining is increasing knowledge about how to treat the virus.  In the beginning, standard treatments used for diseases like flu and pneumonia were applied to treating Covid patients.  Now that some time has passed, more and more knowledge has been acquired as well as additional treatments which have thankfully positively affected the death rate.

[terrydtx]

It looks like the anti vaxers have finally made their presence kwon in this thread. I hope that the cruise industry adopts the be vaccinated or stay home policy so that the anti-vacers must stay home while the rest of us enjoy our cruises. 

[LGW59]

4 minutes ago, terrydtx said:

It looks like the anti vaxers have finally made their presence kwon in this thread. I hope that the cruise industry adopts the be vaccinated or stay home policy so that the anti-vacers must stay home while the rest of us enjoy our cruises. 

Could not agree more!  I trust that the cruise lines will KnowTheScore.

[phoenix_dream]

2 hours ago, OceanCruise said:

• A total of 1.4 million people died from TB in 2019 (including 208 000 people with HIV). Worldwide, TB is one of the top 10 causes of death and the leading cause from a single infectious agent (above HIV/AIDS).

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis

But again, these people are not the people you will normally find filling cruise ships!!  I don't know where or how you have cruised, but on my sailings the majority of people have been from the US, Canada, and Europe.  How many cruises have you seen halted or returned to port due to a TB infection onboard???  I am fairly confident the number is zero - if not zero (which I think it is for major lines) then definitely rare indeed.  Comparing requiring Covid vaccinations to TB vaccinations therefore just does not make any logical sense.