One of the last cruises at sea now has just 8 passengers left after 4 died of the coronavirus and hundreds abandoned ship. Here's how a 140-day world tour turned to disaster.
Sophia Ankel
- The MV Artania is one of the last cruise ships still at sea today, and is traveling back to Germany with just eight passengers and 75 crew members.
- During its 140-day journey around the world, the German ship was forced to quarantine in Fremantle, Western Australia, after it reported several cases of coronavirus onboard.
- While hundreds of healthy passengers were allowed to leave the ship to fly back home, several others had to stay on board.
- Three passengers and one crew member have died from the coronavirus after being taken to local hospitals.
- The ship is expected to stop in Indonesia and the Philippines to drop off crew members who are from there, before returning to Germany. The return leg will be more than a month long.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
A German cruise ship is currently on its way home with only eight guests and 75 crew members after four passengers died from the coronavirus and hundreds more were forced to evacuate.
It is one of the last cruise ships in the world still at sea.
The eight-deck MV Artania embarked on its 140-day world cruise on December 21, 2019 — when China was discovering the world's first coronavirus cases — but was quarantined in Fremantle, Western Australia, in mid-March after several coronavirus cases were found on board.
Three passengers and one 42-year-old crew member who were on the ship have since died. The crew member was the youngest person to die in Australia.
Scroll down to see how disaster unfolded on the German cruise ship and where it is now.
Read the original article on Business InsiderThis journey as been a sad one. As of Friday, four people from the ship have since died from the coronavirus.
Of these victims:
- Two passengers died in local hospitals in Fremantle while the ship was still docked there.
- One crew member died in Fremantle on April 17, a day after the ship left.
- One passenger, a German man in his 70s, died in Sir Charles Gairdne hospital in Fremantle on April 23.
The crew member — a 42-year-old man from the Philippines — became the youngest person to die of the coronavirus on Australian soil, ABC reported.
Source: ABC
The trip back to Germany will be a long one — the cruise's operator says it will arrive in its home port of Bremerhaven on May 31, which is more than five weeks away.
Source: BILD, Phoenix Reisen
It now plans to drop by the Philippines to let more crew members disembark before returning to Germany.
The ship sailed to Jakarta, Indonesia, on April 24 to drop off crew members from the country. This left eight passengers and 75 crew members on board.
Source: Phoenix Reisen
On April 16, the ship — which now had eight passengers on board and hundreds of crew members — left Fremantle. Groups of people gathered to bid them farewell from the Australian mainland.
Source: ABC
Another standoff between the ship and local authorities ensued on April 1, when the MV Artania refused to follow orders to leave the port and asked to stay another 14 days. They were eventually allowed.
This was presumably to allow any passengers with symptoms to be treated.
The MV Artania was deeply popular among many locals in Western Australia, who claimed that passengers from the ship being treated in the hospitals were taking up capacity that should be reserved for Australians, according to the BBC.
Source: ABC
But some of those who tested positive and were showing milder symptoms of the virus were still quarantined on the ship. At this point, 12 passengers and 450 crew members were left on board.
Source: The Points Guy
In the following days, Australian authorities allowed anyone who was still healthy — 832 passengers at this point — to fly home from the nearby Perth airport on a chartered aircraft.
Source: Phoenix Reisen, Bloomberg
But on March 27, the ship was allowed to dock under the condition it would quarantine for two weeks. One day later, 46 passengers started showing symptoms, with Western Australia's state premier saying the situation had reached a "crisis point."
Forty-one of those passengers were taken off the cruise ship and treated in local hospitals, according to ABC.
Source: ABC
At first, the MV Artania was forced to anchor off-shore because Australian authorities were concerned about the potential virus risk posed by the cruise ship.
State authorities said at the time that only passengers with life-threatening conditions would be allowed to leave, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported.
Meanwhile, Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan called on the Royal Australian Navy to help get the vessel — which had not a single Australian national on board — to leave the country's waters.
Source: ABC
But on the way to Fremantle, passengers started showing symptoms of the coronavirus. By the time the cruise ship arrived one week later, seven people had tested positive.
Yet the cruise had every intention to keep going. On March 19, it left for Fremantle, a port city on Australia's western coast, where it planned to make a quick refuel stop before continuing on to Africa, the Suez Canal, and parts of Europe.
Source: The Points Guy
While the MV Artania had no confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the time, it still gave guests the options to fly back to Germany from Sydney. Out of the approximately 1,072 passengers on board, 199 took up of the offer.
Source: The Points Guy
It arrived in Sydney on March 12. Around this time, countries around the world had started blocking cruise ships from docking in their ports for fears of contracting the coronavirus.
At this point, multiple cruise ships had been left abandoned as ports started to shut down all over the world.
The Diamond Princess — which saw a boom in coronavirus cases as it was quarantined in Japan in February — was evidence that cruise ships were hotbeds for the coronavirus to spread.
Source: The Points Guy
It embarked on its 140-day journey from Hamburg, Germany, on December 21, 2019. In the first two months of its journey, it traveled through countries including the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia.
Source: Cruise Mapper
The MV Artania is a 1,200-passenger cruise ship with 600 cabins, two pools, and a cinema. It is operated by German travel agency Phoenix Reisen.
Most of the passengers on this tour were German nationals.
There were also 537 crew members on board, according to CruiseMapper.
Source: CruiseMapper
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