Coronavirus: ‘I dodged a bullet on the cruise of doom’

Today food expert Nick Mosley, who ran the Brighton and Hove Food and Drink Festival and still works with businesses across Sussex, tells how he was lucky to get off the ship just 10 days before the outbreak on board.

I began my travels on Christmas Day with a Cathay Pacific flight from Amsterdam to Bangkok via Hong Kong. At that time, it was business as usual everywhere with coronavirus relegated to an occasional news bite and certainly no evidence of the hysteria that would emerge later in January and February.

Having planned to be away for a two month sabbatical from work, the idea of including a cruise seemed like a good one as it would mean accommodation, travel and food would all be taken out of my hands so I could further switch off my brain. Then in December, a great deal popped up for Princess Cruises. Carpe diem and all that.

After a brief visit to Thailand, Ron and I headed to sunny Singapore on January 6 to board the Princess Diamond for a leisurely 14 night sail via Vietnam, Taiwan and Hong Kong to Japan.

First impressions of the ship met expectations: big, glitzy, terrible carpets. Having been on a couple of cruises before, I can’t say they ever live up to the brochure photos but always – in a perverse way – live up to my personal expectations. The ‘entertainments’ are usually truly naff –although I did learn towel-animal folding on a cruise in the Caribbean that has greatly added to my portfolio of life skills – and the food is always, always mediocre. The Diamond Princess didn’t fail on either count, with the food even in the fine dining restaurants quickly becoming repetitive and rather dull.

That said, I find the joy of cruising is the people you meet. You’re all thrown together in an unusually intense and over-excitable environment so – in my case at least – my fellow bar-flies quickly became besties over untold tiki cocktails, gargantuan gin martinis and tumbler after tumbler of Johnny Walker black label at 2am. The ‘Australian Boys’ – an unlikely grouping of four blokes from Adelaide and Perth – were serial cruisers who regularly holidayed together, complete with flashy Princess Platinum cards. By chance, it turned out that they were staying in the cabin next to us which at the time I thought can’t be too pleasant as we were all on the inside with no window, but they seemed to have a system that worked that meant they didn’t kill each other.

Our other pals were two septuagenarians from Arizona: our ‘Golden Girls’ who were a complete hoot. Clancy and MJ were vaguely related but didn’t know each other well, so again sharing a cabin could have ended in fireworks but thankfully didn’t. We had a lot of fun with them both onboard and on land, ranging from cocktails in the rooftop Aqua bar in Hong Kong to a lengthy hike to find an open pharmacy on a Sunday in rural Japan.

Safe to say, we had a quite an eclectic little shipboard gang.

As the cruise progressed, we increasingly became aware from snatched news items that the Coronavirus was spreading outside of China. There wasn’t really any worry on the ship about it. There were additional signs around encouraging guests to wash their hands more frequently, and perhaps a few more antibacterial hand-gels, but on the whole there didn’t appear to be too much concern. After all, cruise ships are renowned for the spread of tummy bugs so the cleaning crews and staff know full well the importance of proper cleaning, and health and hygiene in food preparation.

I had a cold for a couple of days – fever, cough, tiredness – but I put that down to the time of year and simply being in close confines with so many people from around the world. A day in bed sorted that so by the time we arrived in the south of Japan I was already back up and running, ready to explore Osaka. This is when we started to notice that many more local people were wearing face masks. I was also in Japan a few months earlier back in October 2019, and there was a definite marked increase in masks on the street. The Japanese are prolific mask-wearers anyway but this is usually a cultural courtesy gesture to stop spreading your own germs rather than prevent you catching someone else’s. It appeared that protocol had now been reversed.

The last few days on the cruise passed and we disembarked as planned at Yokohama on the south side of Tokyo Bay on January 20. Then ten days later, the news came that a case of Coronavirus had been found on the Diamond Princess involving a passenger who disembarked in Hong Kong, and the Japanese authorities had quarantined the ship along with its passengers and crew.

Of course, my immediate thought was “wow, we really dodged a bullet on that” but then my mind wandered to thinking perhaps my ‘cold’ wasn’t a cold after all. Then, as the days passed, and the newspaper column inches grew, my thoughts turned to the poor souls who were now imprisoned in their cabins. All of a sudden, a ‘bargain’ inside cabin seemed to be a very foolhardy decision as I doubt that even the strictest of prisons put their worst inmates in confines with no natural light, exercise or fresh air for weeks on end. Although the ship food is marginally better than prison grub.

As the number of cruise guests with coronavirus increased, it seemed very clear that the Japanese authorities had made an error in judgement by locking-down the ship. Above and beyond the psychological trauma of confinement, all of those on board would know that they were at constant risk of infection from any surfaces they touched, even those in their own cabin. And there was the issue of the air-conditioning that flowed throughout ship, connecting cabin to cabin, and sharing air and anything floating in it.

If we’d still been on the ship, then I wondered how we’d have managed in our inside cabin? I definitely pondered on how four adult men would get by in such a tiny space. And as to whether our Golden Girls would be okay.

After China itself and more recently South Korea, the Diamond Princess became the third largest contributor to the total global coronavirus infection rate. Out of 3,700 aboard around 700 to date have contracted the infection. Six passengers have died, including a British passenger last week. As experts in contagious diseases have repeatedly stated, the Japanese authorities undoubtedly made a catastrophic misjudgement in confining passengers and crew to the ship, rather than transfer them to an isolation facility on land. And the governments of the home countries of passengers certainly don’t escape responsibility with their appalling heel-dragging and buck-passing to the Japanese.

The past two months have seen us travel across seven Asian countries, and taken flights too numerous to count. Outwardly, it is the westernised countries - Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong - where the fear of coronavirus is most visible on the streets and in the media. The other countries of South East Asia seem to be taking things more in their stride, although the chances of flying out of or into China are becoming increasingly remote.

Am I scared? No. I’m doing everything that the experts are saying to do – which is primarily washing one’s hands as often as possible. I now have new-found beautifully soft palms. Masks seem pretty pointless unless someone literally coughs directly into your face, which would be unfortunate even in normal circumstances. Demographically, I’m not in a high risk group, and to be honest when we look at statistics for global deaths then Western ailments such as heart disease and stroke, cancer and Alzheimers are for more likely to finish me off. The fact that the developed world has consistently proved it can happily turn a blind eye to global child poverty also makes me question the hysteria around coronavirus. Incidentally, UNICEF puts the figure of child deaths per day caused by poverty at 22,000.

As I write this piece overlooking an empty concourse in Hong Kong airport, Asia feels a very different place than when we arrived in December. Half of this giant international hub is shut down, with hundreds of scheduled flights each week cancelled for the foreseeable future. Airport staff, airline crew and remaining passengers are all wearing masks and in some cases surgical gloves. Any cough or sneeze is met with immediate suspicion and fear. Yet the global spread of the virus and its accompanying circus seems unstoppable. Pandora’s Box may well and truly open, but the upside is that cruise holidays will be more affordable than ever in 2020.