Nearly 300 passengers and 25 crew members of the Ruby Princess cruise ship, which is now docked at the Port of Galveston in Texas, have contracted norovirus.
This is an infectious disease that affects the gastrointestinal tract and is transmitted through contaminated water and food. It is accompanied by fever, bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. In total, there are more than two thousand people on the ship.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all the victims are isolated in their cabins, experts take tests from them to understand the causes of the emergence and spread of the virus.
The ship’s operating company said norovirus outbreaks are not uncommon on cruise ships, primarily due to its high contagiousness, but could not explain what could have caused the disease in so many people. The Ruby Princess cruise ship has already made headlines in the global media during the pandemic, when it was even dubbed a “floating prison”.
In 2020, 660 people on board the ship contracted covid, 28 of them died. Then more than three thousand passengers became unwitting prisoners of the liner for several months. The ship was moored off the coast of Australia, and all vacationers were put under strict quarantine. Subsequently, new outbreaks of coronavirus arose on the ship more than once, when the number of cases was in the hundreds of passengers.