[conspire] (forw) Re: Shared from BBC News

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2020 16:20:23 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: [my biological mother, whose privacy I protect]
Cc: Deirdre Saoirse Moen <deirdre at deirdre.net>
Subject: Re: Shared from BBC News
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting [my biological mother]:

> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53636854
> 
> Hi Rick,
> Have you and Deirdre been on the Hurtigruten?  I have always wanted to
> do that trip but never got around to it... now it looks dimmer and
> dimmer as a possibility.

Hi!  We saw the coverage (though I hadn't seen BBC's article),
and were mortified about the seriousness of Hurtigruten AS's mistakes
that caused this outbreak (and the government-ordered cruise shutdown).  

Neither one of us has yet been on the Hurtigruten ships (of which there
are currently three), but I've long hoped to take the entire route from
Bergen to Kirkenes and perhaps back, with a day or two's stopover in
Kristiansund where Arthur Moen was born and his family came from.

On a couple of occasions, we've visited Norway, including one trip on an
NCL (formerly Norwegian Cruise Lines) ship that stopped in Bergen and 
Ålesund but got no further north along the coast than the latter. 
At the time, I joked about bribing the captain into making a small
detour north.  (Although it's less than 100 miles away, it's almost 11
hours by Hurtigruten with a stop in Molde:
https://www.rome2rio.com/map/Ålesund/Kristiansund#r/Ferry )

The worst of the management failures that occurred in this case was
failure to stop the ship and isolate everyone pending testing when the
first case was found aboard the MS Roald Amundsen -- nor were the 386
passengers informed, either.  Not only did the infection then escalate
to at least 41 cases known aboard the ship so far, but also an unknown
number of persons ashore in the 40 Hurtigruten ports may have been also
exposed.  Hurtigruten AS has _apologised_, but also out of the other
side of their mouths defended what they did as correctly following their
health protocols.

And, if there's now rampant infections in some of those small towns, 
that's really problematic for patient survival and treatment, because
of those towns being in general remote from where serious medicine is.

It's striking that the Hurtigruten main service is actually going to
_continue_ (using at first just the other two ships), and only the
expedition cruises  (e.g, to Svalbard) have been cancelled.  This is in
part because the service really is an essential lifeline among all those
mostly small, sometimes remote coastal towns, and they are deemed
special because of being considered 'ferries'.  All non-ferry ships
bearing more than 100 persons (including crew) have been ordered banned
from Norwegian ports for at least two weeks.  (Well, technically they'll
be allowed to dock, but nobody will be allowed to disembark.)

I suspect that two weeks will be spent, in part, breaking some heads in
the industry and fixing their infection protocols, starting with
breaking the heads of anyone who says 'We were following procedure.'

----- End forwarded message -----