MS Zaandam that spent 12 days at sea with no ports willing to let the vessel dock, pulled into Fort Lauderdale harbour Thursday night. The warm welcome by port workers was followed by a procession of medical personnel in protective gear as they scrambled to take critically ill passengers into ambulances.
Four people died onboard Zaandam. The Coronavirus-ship had been turned away from eleven countries since she last stopped in South America on March 14. According to port documents, 13 passengers and 1 crew are in critical conditions and require hospitalization.
The fleetmate ms Rotterdam met up with Zaandam off Panama to take all healthy passengers but also ended up at the dock in Florida Thursday night with people ill onboard.
Another cruise ship with sick cruise passengers, Coral Princess, was waiting to come into Florida in the coming days. The ship was turned away from Brazil as well as other South American ports nearly 2 weeks ago. The ship's operator, Carnival, said it had a total of 6,000 passengers stuck at sea.
After intervention by President Donald Trump, Florida officials signed off on a safety plan from the cruise operators. Ship's operator Holland America Line (subsidiary of Carnival Corporation) said that following arrival in Port Everglades all passengers would be temperature screened and cleared for entry by US Customs and Border Protection. Most of them would be bused to chartered planes and flown to their home countries. However, 25 cruisers with mild illness symptoms were required to stay on the ship until they recover.
For other ms Zaandam accidents and incidents see at the ship's CruiseMinus page.
For Coronavirus updates on cruise ship quarantines (infected passengers and crew) and top-pandemic countries (COVID-19 cases and deaths, daily updated statistics) see at CruiseMapper's Norovirus page.