Posted on 07/13/2021 4:38:00 AM PDT by blam
Global vaccinations of seafarers are going too slowly to prevent outbreaks on ships from causing more trade disruptions, endangering maritime workers and potentially slowing economies trying to pull out of pandemic slowdowns.
Infections on vessels could further harm already strained global supply chains, just as the U.S. and Europe recover and companies start stocking up for Christmas. The shipping industry is sounding the alarm as infections increase and some ports continue to restrict access to seafarers from developing countries that supply the majority of maritime workers but can’t vaccinate them.
“It’s a perfect storm,” says Esben Poulsson, chairman of the International Chamber of Shipping that represents ship owners. “With this new delta strain, there’s no doubt it’s setting us back and the situation is getting worse. Demand for products isn’t letting up, crew changes aren’t happening fast enough and governments continue to stick their heads in the sand.”
“Gard P&I, the biggest marine insurer among the industry’s more than dozen mutual liability associations, has seen a spike in claims for COVID-19 infections.”
All signs now point to a worsening crisis on the oceans, just as the industry seemed to be emerging from months of port restrictions that hurt the ability of shipping firms to swap out crews and left hundreds of thousands stuck at sea for months. The risks were brought into focus by two recent events that interrupted essential ports and shipping routes.
In May, a sailor died and dozens of hospital workers in Indonesia were sickened with the delta variant of COVID-19 after a ship with an infected Filipino crew docked. About the same time, global shipping was thrown into chaos after one of China’s busiest ports was shuttered for weeks because at least one dock worker was infected as part of a broader outbreak in Shenzhen.
Gard P&I, the biggest marine insurer among the industry’s more than dozen mutual liability associations, has seen a spike in claims for COVID-19 infections. There were more than 100 outbreaks monthly in April and May that struck vessels and offshore mobile units such as drilling platforms involving multiple sick seafarers in each case, according to Alice Amundsen, vice president of people claims. During the peak of the pandemic in July-August 2020, Gard saw almost 80 outbreaks on vessels and offshore units that infected some 160 people, she said.
Health workers prepare doses of COVID-19 vaccine for sailors and port workers in Port Klang, Malaysia, on June 25, 2021. Photo credit: Samsul Said/Bloomberg.
“It’s a little bit like a fire that is glowing and it could quickly turn into a firestorm again,” said Rene Piil Pedersen, managing director of AP Moller-Maersk A/S in Singapore. Even as more people get vaccinated, COVID will be around for years and there will still be outbreaks in ports and on ships, he said last month, calling on governments and industry to work together to protect seafarers and dock workers as essential employees supporting critical supply chains all over the world.
Limited Vaccinations
Despite efforts in the U.S. and elsewhere to inoculate seafarers in ports, most are still largely dependent on their home countries for vaccinations, and more than half of the 1.6 million seafarers globally come from developing nations such as India, the Philippines or Indonesia, which are well behind most developed economies in vaccinations.
The lack of international coordination can be seen in the fact that there’s no estimate of how many seafarers have actually been vaccinated. That’s because there’s no one organization or company keeping track of the situation for all workers across various companies, ships and ports.
The International Chamber of Shipping estimates only 35,000-40,000 seafarers — or just 2.5% of the global pool — are vaccinated. However, more than 23,000 seafarers had been jabbed in the U.S. with the help of various charities, and China’s Cosco Shipping Holdings Co. said last month that all seafarers who are onshore and are fit for vaccinations have been inoculated.
India has kicked off inoculation programs for its more than 200,000 seafarers, but Poulsson and ship managers, including Wilhelmsen Ship Management, say the drive needs momentum. As of May, roughly 14% of India’s seafarers had received a single dose of the vaccine, and 1% had received both doses, according to the Hindu Business Line, citing an industry estimate.
Many seafarers are having trouble procuring their second dose of vaccines since that is often left to the discretion of local clinics, according to Chirag Bahri, director of regions at International Seafarers’ Welfare and Assistance Network in India.
“The government’s put something on paper to say they’ve made seafarers essential workers, but they are not being prioritized for vaccinations,” Bahri said. “Without a second dose, they really can’t get on a ship.”
Shippers Buy Vaccines
In the Philippines, several firms including Maersk have said they’re working with the government to procure shots for their workers. While seafarers get priority access, vaccines are in short supply, with several cities around the capital region of Manila halting vaccination programs in recent days as supplies ran out.
Even if shots were available at home, they’re no good for workers already aboard ships, some of whom many not finish contracts until next year. About 99% of Filipino seafarers are unvaccinated, said Gerardo Borromeo, the Manila-based vice chair of the ICS, who estimates it will take a year to inoculate them all.
That’s bad news for the shipping industry — the Philippines supplies some 460,000 seafarers, or 25% of the global maritime work force, according to the government. And until more seafarers from all over the world are vaccinated, infections will continue to spike.
The easiest solution would be for every port to have a clinic and offer vaccinations to all seafarers coming through, according to Ben Cowling, head of the University of Hong Kong’s department of epidemiology and biostatistics. So far, that’s not happening in many places, with only a handful of countries following the U.S. lead in offering vaccinations to seafarers who come into ports, regardless of their nationality.
“For parts of the world where they are aiming to eliminate COVID, loopholes including maritime workers at container ports, are opportunities for the virus to break through,” said Cowling. “They have to eliminate the risk coming off container ships.”
And if the risk to seafarers isn’t eliminated, then further port shutdowns or outbreaks on ships taking them out of services will make it even harder and more expensive to get Christmas shopping done.
“We will run out of the available crew,” said Columbia Shipmanagement Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Mark O’Neil, whose company oversees a crew pool of 18,000 people. “They would either have COVID, or they will be part of a COVID-infected crew, or they will not be vaccinated and therefore will not be allowed into a port. The number of vessels operating will be reduced.”
Refuse vaccines! We must help China by keeping the pandemic going. The longer USA and other western countries keep pandemic going, is great news for the rising super power China.
Good grief.
They are so desperate to push the vaccine, they will make up any excuse to justify it.
What a foolish point of view.
We are NOT helping China by refusing an experimental medical treatment.
We are helping China by outsourcing our manufacturing to them and entering trade agreements that help them and hurt us.
Want to hurt China?
Bring back manufacturing to this country or take it to US friendly countries, and refuse to buy made in China products as much as possible.
THAT’S what’s going to hurt China more than some individual not taking the vaccine.
You vaxxers are like liberals and race. To them, everything is about race. To you, everything is about the vax.
I think I see the problem. And I didn't even have to download an app to figure it out. I wonder if my wife is wearing a new dress.
From a propaganda analysis standpoint, it is SO interesting to watch the shift from ‘deaths’ to ‘cases/infected’.
Conversations I’ve overheard among average people suggest it is having the intended effect.
This is how our government is going to push it.
They have to recognize it would be unconstitutional to mandate vaccination, and would likely lose any case that reached the Supreme Court.
So they are going to outsource mandates to industry and let industry drive it.
They have publicly said this at all levels.
Any cases that get challenged will likely be ruled very narrowly against a specific industry or company in favor of a plaintiff harmed by it. Which means that fighting back against employer mandates will be disconnected whack-a-mole.
I see a similarity in the way this government has stated they are going to leverage private industry to collect intelligence and spy on Americans because they cannot figure out a way to get around the Constitution.
And industry will likely obtain and disseminate intelligence far more efficiently than the government has, and will make money off of it. They will give it to malignant entities in the government to do as they wish.
A government that can force a needle to be inserted into your arm for something can force anything. And that is not an exaggeration. Many people, even on this very forum, do not understand this concept at all.
If this virus had a 30-50% mortality rate like Smallpox or Bubonic Plague, you wouldn’t have to force people to get vaccines, quarantine, or wear masks or do completely dumb ass crap like vaccine compliance lotteries. People would clamor for a vaccine, would self-quarantine, would wear space helmets, and governments wouldn’t have to impinge on liberty and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising campaigns and idiotic lotteries while we go ever deeper into debt.
I am astonished to see, even on this conservative forum, that there are people who seem fully on board with these unconstitutional approaches that erode liberty and cost unnecessary money we don’t have.
See my post above at #8.
You have not learned to observe data from all over United States and all over the world. The pandemic is strongest where vaccination rates are lowest.
But you do not surprise me one bit. An head-strong person is unwilling to look at reality and change their opinion. Because that is tantamount to admitting they were wrong. Their ego will not allow it.
Based on what?
Government numbers?
They’ll tell us what they want us to hear in order to keep their control over us.
They have lied to us so much, only a fool would trust them at this point.
COVID is a cold. It’s not Black Death or small pox.
The biggest problem with the case rate and death rate from it came at the hands of the government, not because of the disease.
You are projecting again.
Because like me there are rational people on this board who put aside political views and look at reality. For me it comes from spending a lifetime in mechanical engineering field where opinions were useless and actual results were paramount.
Areas of United states with lowest vaccination rates have highest rates of covid. Ditto from every country in the world.
But let not reality come in the way of political beliefs.
I do not want to get into argument with head strong people.
Good bye.
I agree that there are irrational people on this and other forums. It makes me irritated to see responses like “the virus is a hoax”. That is irrational. However, that does NOT mean that things done under its aegis are NOT a hoax. (I have to accept that double negative there)
You say you are rational, and that comes from your engineering background, which I accept. My rationality comes from spending nearly forty years in Health Care, so yes, I agree, but using your sentence:
We shouldn’t let reality get in the way of political beliefs. /sarcasm tag added
This is not the Bubonic Plague. This is not Smallpox. This is a bad flu. Flu kills people, and this does too, with slightly more lethality by a percentage point or so. The virus is not a hoax, it does exist. What has been done in its name is a vicious hoax.
You say there are rational people like you who look at the reality, and that is fine, I accept that.
However, the reality is, we may have irreparably damaged our economy, and we may have inflicted long term damage not just on all citizens but especially younger ones who have lost valuable times in their forming lives due to this insane shutdown of the economy and society, robbing people of their own businesses and livelihoods and creating a dependence state that is no joke. All this for a virus with an approximately 2% mortality rate, an as far as we know, that mortality rate could be wildly overestimated.
For example, I don’t believe in the sensitivity or specificity of the diagnostic tests.
If someone has the same test administered four times in one day as Elon Musk did, and had two come back positive, and two come back negative, that tells me one of two things: The test is either completely unreliable because the test methodology itself is unreliable, or the administration of the test is so exacting and user dependent that the variability from different people who might follow the testing instructions differently. Granted, Elon Musk could by lying or exaggerating. But I don’t think that is the case.
To accurately calculate the mortality rate, you need to know how many people have a condition versus how many people die from it. The big joke is that people who are killed by gunshot wounds have been counted in some methodologies to have died from the virus, and that miraculously, nobody died from some standard variant of flu this past year. So, the fatalities due to this virus could be vastly overstated. Couple that with the number of people who they use for the denominator
You as an engineer should understand risk assessment.
There was no rational risk assessment done on this. Zero. None.
It was shut everything down, isolate everyone, mask everyone, unconstitutionally force people out of business, and focus on a vaccine without even a peep about actual preventative or symptomatic treatment.
And in all this
Never mind focusing on protecting those who NEED protection. Those people absolutely should be protected, with everything from quarantining to emergency vaccines if that is their informed medical choice. (Big “if” there)
Once a virulent pathogen escapes containment, it CANNOT be contained in a global closely connected world like ours. Can’t be done. And the fact that the CDC wanted to treat it as if it could be done (or appear as if it wanted to treat it that way even if it knew otherwise) is damning about either their medical expertise or political intentions.
The virus is no hoax, but the approach to dealing with it is a gigantic hoax. And the people who were responsible for pushing this will be nowhere to be found when the chickens come home to roost on this. And we may not see the ramifications of this for some time, perhaps years.
The point is: forcing people to get an inoculation is unconstitutional. And that is what our own government is doing. To deny that depriving people of free travel, free association, their livelihoods, worship, and social interaction is forcing people, that would be denying reality.
#1 I am AGAINST ANY government MANDATES for health related issues.
#2 I agree 100% covid is far less consequential than Plague or Smallpox. I had both, smallpox and covid. I know the differences first hand.
#3 Only reason covid can not be ignored is because it is highly infectious. And also it can kill people with serious existing health issues. You probably know this better than most others.
Agreed. My point is, from the beginning when we realized it wasn’t Smallpox or Bubonic Plague, we should have focused on protecting the vulnerable and people with existing health issues.
From mid to late March 2020, we knew what this thing was, and the standard one-size-fits-all approach just grated on me.
You see, I got the vaccine. No hesitation, I just got it, because even if the vaccine was untested and potentially could cause long term issues, my #1 professional priority was twofold: Protect patients, and ease their minds.
I am not an anti-vaccine person, and as a military dependent growing up traveling completely around the world by the age of 13, an active duty Navy person, and a lifetime in healthcare, I get vaccines and stick my arm out for them.
But...it has always been, as an American, MY choice to do so. MINE! For the good of the service, and later, for the good of my patients, I uncomplainingly take whatever vaccine they say they want me to get, for the good of the patients and their mindset.
But I will soon be forced. Being my choice is no problem. Being forced to accept it is another ball of wax altogether, and...this may cause me to lose my job. I have been with one institution for the last 34 years.
Not many people are that lucky. But if they force me, as they seemingly intend to do, I will have to make a choice on principle.
Of all the things I despise about the Left, it is their fomenting of this issue that is making me the angriest. And that is saying a lot.
We all hope that, when the time comes in our life when we have to sacrifice for principle, that we have the courage to do it. We never know. I don’t know.
But when the time comes, and I sense it will in the next four or five months...when they force me to get another inoculation, that I will be on the spot, alone.
I pray to God I can make the choice I will live with. I may die as a result of my choice if I make it and I sure don’t want to die. But I have had an amazing life if that happens and it will be my choice. I have thought for some years now that the old saying is true: there are things worse than death, and one of those is compromising yourself and your principles for safety and security, neither of which are ever guaranteed anyway.
Anyway, thanks for a reasonable discussion, and thanks for letting me talk.
Your civil and intelligent posts are deeply appreciated.
There is no question in my mind knowing what we know now about covid, general shut downs were very bad decisions. Younger healthy people should never have been shut down. That was obvious by April-May of 2020 when people killed by covid were mainly the kind living in nursing homes.
As for the shots, I am 81 and had my 2nd shot on March 4th, and it has caused me no problems. Ditto with my wife who is now in her 4th year of fighting stage-4 cancer.
But I am not likely to volunteer for a booster shot.
I suspect I, as a company man, will be forced to make a choice when the edict comes down.
If there are people picketing, I will have to join them.
I despise the people running this country. Me. A patriotic American, who grew up on military bases and served myself, marched in Washington against Leftists, now hate my own government. I can’t even fly my American flag, it makes me that angry.
It is hard for me to grasp sometimes. But here we are.
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