From the now-ill-fated Zaandam cruise ship back to Boston, just missing the worst of it
The morgue would hold three people.
As a passenger last month aboard the cruise ship Zaandam, and as a retired engineer and lifelong boater, I leaped at the opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes tour. It was March 5, two days before the end of our cruise. Only five other passengers joined me. The tour included everything from the laundry to the florist’s shop. As we toured the large food storage area, the guide casually mentioned that behind an adjacent closed door was the ship’s morgue.
We shouldn’t have been shocked. A cruise ship is like a small city, and people do die unexpectedly. Given that this was a Holland America ship, with a target market of older people (my wife and I are 73), such a possibility was reasonable. But the guide said that the morgue had never been used, and the capacity of three was simply to exceed what anyone could possibly imagine needing in the worst possible circumstances.
We had left Santiago, Chile, almost two weeks earlier and were heading for Buenos Aires. When we boarded, we were asked whether we had visited China recently or had respiratory symptoms; we would have been denied boarding if we had. There was hand sanitizer, and the smell of chlorine was everywhere. But no one seemed sick, and judging from media coverage we saw aboard ship, the coronavirus apparently had not reached South America. The general reaction we heard was that the world was overreacting to a localized and isolated problem. As we left the ship in Buenos Aires, about a thousand people were crammed together for at least an hour in the terminal to collect luggage and get a cab.
When we got to our hotel, another older couple was checking out, on their way to board the Zaandam for the return trip to Santiago. This was actually the sailing that we wanted when we made our reservations last summer. But I grudgingly changed to the earlier sailing date to get a better cabin.
During the few days we were in Buenos Aires, the world seemed to be waking up to the virus threat. News stories reported emptier planes and the evolving horror in Italy. Our flight home was half empty. Still, we made it with minimal hassle. Three days later, after President Trump imposed screening for European arrivals, chaos erupted at the airports.
I wondered what was happening to those people on that return cruise to Santiago.. When I tracked the Zaandam’s position, I saw the comforting information that it had left Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Chile, and was heading north, right on schedule.
Over a week later, I happened to see a headline about cruise ship passenger deaths. I was shocked to see it was the Zaandam. I was even more shocked to learn that it was the same group of passengers who should have disembarked nearly a week earlier in Santiago. As of Thursday the Zaandam reportedly has gained permission to dock in Florida, with many details still uncertain.
The ship has medical facilities but certainly not the capability of a shoreside hospital intensive care unit. Four have died.
The morgue, with a capacity of three, was not big enough after all.
by Tom Sciacca, Wayland
April 2020