It’s not quite the second coming of the Poop Cruise, but 2,000 passengers who were set to board a Princess cruise near Perth, Australia are really sad since their trip has been canceled due to mysterious mechanical issues. This might not have attracted news attention if the last sailing of the same ship hadn’t experienced a norovirus outbreak, earning the nickname “Pandemic Princess.”

Norovirus is what you most likely really have when you have the symptoms that most people call “stomach flu,” if you don’t have some form of food poisoning. The “Plague Princess” cruise, which left the port of Fremantle near Perth on August 18th, had mostly people over 75 as passengers, making the presence of a vicious gastrointestinal bug on board even more dangerous.

The cruise line estimated that about 100 of the 2,000 people on board had the bug, and that “the problem had been contained,” since the number of new cases declined sharply. However, the 95% of passengers who weren’t vomiting themselves inside out say that they weren’t alerted to the outbreak, and they would have liked to know so they could have taken extra precautions or something. The press began calling the ship the “Pandemic Princess,” and estimates of how many people really were sick grew.

We’re going to pretend that Princess ran the entire ship through a massive, cruise ship-sized car wash filled with undiluted bleach, because it would be really fun if that existed. Also impractical, though.

Still, once everything was sanitized, everything was ready for another sailing, right? Nope. Princess has since announced that the ship itself is sick, canceling the next trip due to “technical issues.” Passengers can hang out and stay on the ship until they can arrange transportation back home…or schedule another last-minute vacation. They will receive full refunds and a free cruise. On a different ship. We hope.

2000 stranded by ‘Pandemic Princess’ [The West Australian] (Thanks, Rowell!)
Sea Princess Fremantle to Singapore ride a ‘cruise from hell’ [Western Australia Today]

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