Day 92: The Germ Boats Strike Back

The Miami Herald is still on the plague ship watch, with the latest numbers and a google spreadsheet of their data. They also reported on the mysterious death Thursday of the senior doctor of the Norwegian Cruise Lines ship Norwegian Gem. Germ Boat #28 is currently off the Bahamas with only crew aboard. Dr. Alex Guevara died in his sleep of "cardio-respiratory arrest," but rumor has it that he was suffering from pneumonia at the time, and had been working with a nurse who tested positive.

The cruise line asserts without any evidence or testing that the doctor, who was treating crew with "respiratory illnesses", did not have COVID-19. They also asserted that the previous crew death aboard, of a 56-year-old Filipino man with tachycardia arrhythmia in mid-April, was not due to COVID-19 despite the lack of either testing or an autopsy. To add insult to injury, they also acted illegally in their handling of the single COVID-19 case that they have admitted among the crew of #28.

I found Germ Boat #29, the Celebrity Apex, in the Herald's data, but the Guardian has the most recent coverage of the world's newest plague ship. The ship was completed by Chantiers de l'Atlantique in Saint-Nazaire, France in early March. It appears to have been the first cruise ship ever delivered virtually (to Celebrity Cruises), due to coronavirus restrictions on travel at the time. While the planned inaugural ceremonies were soon postponed to a much later date, a crew of 1,407 was installed and a party was held in late March despite the French lockdown.

After a handful of early cases appeared, the crew was quarantined on the ship, which has apparently never left dock at Saint-Nazaire. Wikipedia has case numbers as of April 15th, at which point 224 people were positive out of 1444 tested. (The Guardian reports that two were still hospitalized and 700 trapped aboard at that time.) An infected crew member from Bulgaria who managed to escape and recover has since launched a class-action lawsuit against the cruise line in US district court.

On the drug front, a preprint from yesterday reports on the Broad-spectrum antiviral activity of naproxen: from Influenza A to SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus, apparently by binding to the viral nucleocapsid protein. They both modeled this interaction and reproduced it in vitro, and are now working on a clinical trial. Rumors you may have heard earlier in the pandemic that NSAIDs were bad for you were baseless even at the time; the rumor-mongers seem to have backed off when the cytokine storms blew through.

Massachusetts is up 3% again today. Currently hospitalized and ICU cases have fallen. There have been no mask rebellions like the one in Stillwater, OK. PlagueBlog has already observed risk compensation (one of the many dangers of ersatz masks) among the masked masses.