Is It Anything?

Last week there was an outbreak of Norovirus on Royal Caribbean’s Explorer of the Seas, a giant Voyager-class ship. It affected only 272 people of the 4,436 onboard, but does bring us to a reporting quandary.

That’s really only a little more than 6% of all the people onboard. (It breaks down to 252 out of 3,252 passengers and 20 out of 1,184 crew members.) When you look at the daily statistics you see that on Monday 56 people reported the illness, and it peaked with 80 people reporting the symptoms the next day. It fell off to 40 the next day and then continued dropping. When you consider the symptoms last only about 24-48 hours, and people are asked to remain in their cabins for another 24 hours, it means there are really very few people affected at any one time.

For a while on The Late Show with David Letterman, they had a feature called "Is This Anything?" The curtain would come up, a specialty act would perform for maybe a minute, and when the curtain would go down Letterman and Paul Shaffer would discuss if it was anything. Sometimes it would be something like a woman spinning a dozen hula hoops at one time, or a man balancing a chair on his chin, and other times it would be something like a dog pushing a monkey across the stage in a baby stroller. Most of the time the decision would be, "No, that’s not really anything."

That’s kind of the same thing as these Norovirus incidents.

On the one hand, you have 272 people stricken with an uncomfortable and unpleasant illness that lasts for a couple of days. That’s a significant-sounding number. In this case when the ship arrived in Grand Cayman, in order to prevent the spread of Norovirus to the island, the government prohibited passengers who had reported symptoms at any time during the cruise (and those sharing their cabins) from coming ashore, and further disrupted lots of vacations.

On the other hand, as large as the ship is, it’s a very small percentage of the population.

According to the CDC, Norovirus is the second most common illness in the US, second only to the common cold. "Stomach flu," as it’s often called, commonly runs through schools, offices and other closed environments each year, infecting higher percentages of their populations, and seldom gets mentioned in the news. What calls attention to it in the case of the cruise industry is that it’s the only place where outbreaks are required to be reported to a governmental agency.

Of course Royal Caribbean stepped up their prevention procedures, as we always report, to their highest level of disinfection and quickly brought the outbreak under control. (The outbreak, by the way, was, as usual, traced to a passenger who reported he was experiencing some symptoms when he came aboard.) As a goodwill gesture, for passengers who remained isolated in their cabins due to the illness, Royal Caribbean is providing a 50% discount on their next cruise.

So the quandary for the news media is, "Is This Anything?"

If you look beyond just the number of people affected, even just as far as the percentage (especially since Norovirus doesn’t even get reported to or by anyone when it occurs in other institutions), we have to say the answer, like on Letterman is probably, "Not really."

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