Day 69 Retrospective: Making the Diamond Princess Look Good

PlagueBlog apologizes for being unavailable for day 69. (We are not infected.) Massachusetts numbers were up 13%. Also, someone's been testing our sewage and thinks we have 100,000 cases, not 18,941.

The Germ Boat of the Day on Thursday, April 9th was #22, the Aurora Expeditions ship Greg Mortimer, on a 21-day Antarctic cruise out of Ushuaia since March 15th. Though its original destination was Puerto Williams, Chile, both Chile and Argentina have closed their ports, so the plague ship instead anchored in the Rio de la Plata (between Argentina and Uruguay) on March 27th, hoping to eventually dock in Uruguay. The Uruguayan government, for its part, refused docking until all passengers died tested negative. Note that 128 passengers and crew out of 217 are infected, including the ship's doctor, but Uruguay is keeping their social distance from all 217.

A week ago Saturday six especially ill passengers were evacuated in a PPE-heavy Uruguayan naval operation. Two more such passengers were evacuated on Wednesday. This Saturday the ship finally docked in Montevideo, where about 110 Australian and New Zealander passengers were escorted "along a 'sanitary corridor'" to a waiting charter plane.

The crew of 80, along with 20 European and American passengers, remain aboard the ship waiting to die test negative.