The Alaska cruise season met its demise last week, just a few days after it started.
The only ship to sail in the state during the pandemic had to turn around halfway through its first trip after a passenger got a call that he had tested positive for COVID-19.
All 36 passengers aboard the Wilderness Adventurer, operated by Seattle-based Uncruise, were quarantined at a local Juneau hotel.
Most of those guests have now been cleared to go home. But the passenger who tested positive is still serving out a 14-day isolation period in Juneau despite later testing negative.
On a call with reporters Thursday, Uncruise CEO Dan Blanchard said it’s tempting to believe the test at the airport was a false positive.
“Maybe it would be easy to land on saying this is a false positive because we’d be able to point our finger at a test or something,” he said. “But the reality is that it’s not that simple.”
Blanchard says he’s choosing to stand with the doctors and epidemiologists who consistently treat positive tests results — especially when they come from the type of tests used by the state lab — as positive cases.
“So, you know, the bottom line is, when we get a positive COVID test, let’s say from the airport, we consider that patient to be positive,” said Alaska State Epidemiologist Dr. Joe McLaughlin.
And what about the fact that the passenger on the Uncruise ship tested negative just 3 days after testing positive?
“So, somebody who gets a subsequent test that’s negative doesn’t mean that the previous test was a false positive,” explained McLaughlin. “It probably means that the person was tested somewhere further down in their course of infection and didn’t have enough virus in their respiratory secretions to trigger a positive test.”
The state approved Uncruise’s plan to operate during the pandemic. All passengers were sent at-home COVID-19 tests a few days before the trip and had to arrive in Alaska with a negative test result in hand in order to board the ship.
There was no transmission of the virus among passengers and crew, and none showed any signs or experienced any symptoms of infection.
But the damage is done. The Wilderness Adventurer is sailing back to the shipyard in Seattle. Most of the passengers are either home or on their way home, and the company has canceled the rest of its trips for the year.
