On Monday, the Ruby Princess cruise ship left San Francisco for its next voyage– a 15-day cruise to Hawaii – after returning to the port with a cluster of COVID-19 cases aboard.
The cruise ship had just returned to San Francisco on Sunday from a 15-day trip to the Panama Canal. Princess Cruises released a statement saying that all the passengers and crew who tested positive had either asymptomatic or mild symptoms and were taken care of by the medical team aboard the ship. However the cruise line didn’t specify the actual number of people who contracted the virus.
All of the passengers and crew aboard the ship were vaccinated.
The cruise line said that passengers who tested positive and didn’t finish their isolation period were sent home via private transportation or they were given accommodations to hotels that the cruise line had previously coordinated with for quarantine purposes.
This is second time this year that the Ruby Princess has arrived in California with passengers who tested positive for COVID. In January, twelve passengers arriving from a 10-day Mexico cruise were found to have the virus after being randomly tested while the ship was docking in San Francisco.
The ship is currently listed as “under observation” on the Center of Disease Control and Prevention’s “Cruise Ship Status Dashboard.”
The CDC recently lowered cruising to a Level 2 “moderate” health risk.
