The COVID Cruise: How a repeat plague ship, The Diamond Princess, became the ultimate COVID super spreader
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
It seems like forever since the cruise ship The Diamond Princess was quarantined in Yokohama Harbour on Feb. 4. It’s almost forgotten that nearly a thousand people became infected with coronavirus on the floating Petri dish, with 14 eventual deaths.
It was the largest outbreak outside of China at the time, and, if the world was paying attention, a stark demonstration of how blazingly contagious this new virus was.
Specialists in hazmat gear enter the Diamond Princess (Credit: Charly Triballeau - AFP Getty Images)
Watching the documentary The Covid Cruise – which debuts Friday on CBC’s The Nature of Things – gave me a shiver of déjà vu. My wife and I had taken that exact cruise around Japan in 2018 on the same ship, with the same captain (Gennaro Arma, who only exists here as a voice on the P.A. system, given the probable access limitations faced by filmmakers Mike Downie and David Wells).
While it was an amazing experience, it’s chilling to imagine being told, as we were preparing to disembark for good, that we’d have to stay on board, confined to the claustrophobic four walls of our cabin for weeks.
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The doc does not go into the Diamond Princess’s previous history as a plague ship (in 2016, 158 passengers and crew came down with the intestinal norovirus), but there are parallels of overconfidence between Canada’s SARS experience and the cruise ship’s hand sanitizers that greeted passengers on every deck. One epidemic does not necessarily prepare you for another, worse one.
What The Covid Cruise does do well is put a human face on the quarantined, and analyze the various bad-choice options that faced Japanese health authorities as the virus percolated just offshore. These include an American mystery novelist, Gay Courter (whose previous thriller had been set on a cruise ship, and who has since written a book about her quarantine experience) and her husband Phil, a retired doc filmmaker.
Captain Gennaro Arma
Canadians include a Richmond Hill couple, Ya Tsan and Kitty Ng, whose celebration of Kitty’s retirement leads to Ya in a Tokyo hospital fighting for his life, and Vancouverite Spencer Fehrenbacher, whose shock and pessimism is palpable about lessons not taken seriously from the Diamond Princess as the epidemic was beginning.
There’s also some evocative footage of the below decks predicament of the crew, in confines not amenable to social distancing, and a visit by a Japanese infectious disease specialist, Professor Kentaro Iwata, who sends a message to the world that disease controls are breaking down (and then some).
Considering where we are now, a look back is a helpful reminder that maybe COVID-19 could have turned out differently. It also may make you rethink any future plans to travel by cruise ship (the SeaDream 1, the first ship to cruise the Caribbean since March, recently had passengers test positive its first time out).
The COVID Cruise. Directed by Mike Downey and David Wells. Starring Gay Courter, Spencer Fehrenbacher and Ya Tsan. Debuts Friday, November 27 at 9 p.m. ET. Starts free streaming the same day on CBC GEM.