Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Two weeks ago, I was happily sailing on a huge cruise ship in the Indian Ocean.
My wife Colleen is a travel agent and I was tagging along with her and her group on a Celebrity Cruise Line ship as it sailed from Dubai to Singapore and back with 2,300 souls aboard.
Everyone on board our ship knew what was happening that same week to the unlucky people stuck on the Diamond Princess cruise liner docked offshore Tokyo.
Because a passenger who left Diamond Princess nine days earlier in Hong Kong had tested positive for the new coronavirus sweeping China, the Japanese government had ordered everyone to stay aboard the luxury cruise ship.
We weren’t doctors or epidemiologists, just vacationers.
But we knew that cooping up 2,666 people together on the Diamond Princess for 14 days was going to be trouble — and it was.
Because Japanese officials dithered around and then screwed up their containment measures on the ship for two weeks, the Diamond Princess became what the New York Times called “a floating epidemiological disaster.”
According to the Times, “with 634 infections and two deaths, the cruise ship represents the largest concentration of coronavirus cases outside China.”
We were a lot luckier, even though we never made it all the way to Singapore.
Our wise captain decided it wasn’t worth the risk of getting any closer to the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak and we turned back to Dubai after stopping at Sri Lanka.
The Celebrity Cruise Line people did everything right. Everyone was compensated for their lost cruise time and given $500 to pay for straightening up their travel arrangements.
Most important, as far as I know, no one on our cruise ship caught the flu.
Since I’ve been back in Southern California, however, I’ve been getting sick watching the mainstream media sensationalize the dangers of the coronavirus.
Every time another country like Greece gets its first official coronavirus case, they throw up another panicky headline about how the deadly pandemic is seemingly putting every human on the planet at risk.
The mainstream media rarely take the trouble to point out that it is the already sick, the very old and the very young who are most likely to die from flu-caused problems like pneumonia, strokes and heart attacks.
The coronavirus may yet live up to its media hype and become a true pandemic in the United States or elsewhere that kills hundreds of thousands. I hope not.
But as the Dow Jones index dropped several thousand points last week, it would have been nice if the media had put the death toll of the coronavirus in the proper perspective.
Michael Reagan is the president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Contact him at: