MIAMI — As Aurora Expeditions’ Greg Mortimer cruise ship approached Uruguay in late March seeking permission to disembark sick passengers, the cruise company encouraged the ship’s doctor to downplay the situation on board in his health declaration form, according to internal emails obtained by the Miami Herald. Now that all the passengers have left, the company has fired the top safety officer after he raised concerns about taking the ship on a three-week journey to Europe before repatriating crew.
The ship left Ushuaia, Argentina, on March 15 with new passengers despite the industry’s decision to stop U.S. operations two days prior after repeated warnings from health officials across the world that cruise ships were exceptionally dangerous for COVID-19 infection. At least 128 of the 217 people aboard would become infected, and one crew member would die of the disease in Uruguay.
On March 22, the ship’s physician, Dr. Mauricio Usme, discovered the first passenger with a fever during his twice daily temperature checks of all passengers and crew. He alerted the captain (Joachim Saterskog), who alerted the crewing agency (Miami-based CMI/SunStone Ships), the shore-side medical company (Fort Lauderdale-based Vikand), and the cruise company (Australia-based Aurora Expeditions).
After determining Argentina would not allow the ship to return, Usme began preparing the one-page health declaration form for Uruguay. By that point, several more passengers and crew members showed symptoms. In response to the question about whether any sanitary measure (quarantine, isolation, decontamination) had been applied on board, Usme marked “yes” and explained that sick patients were in a 14-day quarantine and all other passengers and crew were self-isolating.
In three separate communications, executive vice president of CMI/SunStone Ships Chris Dlugokecki, Vikand doctor Jenny Garcia, and Aurora Expeditions board member Glenn Haifer urged Usme to change the declaration.
On March 25, Dlugokecki sent an email to the captain saying that the answer to the question about quarantine should be “no” since the ship was not under a government quarantine. The captain forwarded Dlugokecki’s suggestion to Usme urging him to make the change.
Usme stood firm. In a meeting with the captain the next day, he said, “It’s not possible to change because the health declaration reflects the accurate information,” according to a recording of the meeting obtained by the Herald.
That evening, Garcia called Usme asking for an update. He repeated that he would not change the declaration after fielding several questions about whether he thought the patients on board had COVID-19. “These people have coronavirus, until we can prove they don’t,” he said. “I’m never going to change the declaration.”
The pressure mounted just after midnight on March 26, when Haifer emailed Usme and the captain explaining that he was working to arrange flights for passengers from Montevideo and that the Australian government was working with Uruguay.
“The risk we carry is public outcry and wharf side workers refusing to allow the ship to berth and allow passengers to disembark, assuming that we get approval and the details we don’t know,” he wrote. “Please bear in mind that how you write the health declaration will influence the way that this is viewed. We don’t know we have Covid 19. We are taking precautions as if we do. Give limited information truthfully and they may ask for me if they haven’t got it from their government channels.”
Usme emailed Haifer back saying he would not change the declaration. “For ethics, for morality, for responsibility with ourselves and with the health of those who are not affected, the health declaration must reflect the reality that we currently have,” he wrote.
Uruguay allowed the ship to anchor in its waters on March 27 after receiving the accurate declaration and sent a medical team to examine everyone on board. Usme was briefly hospitalized in Montevideo after contracting the virus on board and returned to the ship on April 15. All the passengers were able to disembark by April 17.
But 84 crew members remain on the ship, at least 31 of them with COVID-19. One crew member from the Philippines, Ronnie Lorenzo, 48, died from the disease on April 17.
Dlugokecki from CMI/SunStone Ships said in a statement that all positive crew members are asymptomatic, and the company is having trouble repatriating crew.
“Since our arrival in Montevideo, we have been working hard to repatriate all crew immediately, but nobody is allowing us to disembark any crew, positive or negative, and we have no flights available,” the statement said. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Uruguay and Aurora Expeditions in Australia did not respond to a request for comment.
Vikand’s CEO Peter Hult said the documentation the Herald obtained does not portray an accurate picture of what took place, but did not provide any information.
For weeks, the Miami-based crewing agency CMI/SunStone Ships has been telling the crew that the ship will be making the journey to Spain’s Canary Islands as soon as it is virus-free. Usme and other crew members want to get off the ship and home to their families as soon as possible.
“I don’t recommend, I am completely against the journey this ship wants to do,” said Usme. “Twenty days alone in the ocean … in a ship full of people who if we don’t disembark, the viral cycle of the virus will never stop … In this ship we are destroyed. And here no one wants to travel to the Canary Islands because first of all, common sense, it’s a decision that the ship is thinking about the operations part, not thinking about us as people or human beings.”
In a meeting with the ship’s captain and first officer on Saturday, safety officer Lukasz Zuterek, third in command, raised concerns about the planned three-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean with no access to land hospitals. He has tested negative twice, but said he fears he will become sick, too. He told the captain that if the ship does not alter the plans to sail to Europe, he will refuse to stay on board the ship for the journey and involve the local police if he has to.
“On such a small place where we still have to work and eat from one galley and move around the same spaces, it’s impossible to control it,” he said about the virus. “And that’s the problem they didn’t want to see. So they decide to disembark passengers, and they didn’t want to look for opportunity for us to go to shore.”
Later that day, the captain and the chief officer notified Zuterek that he was being called to a disciplinary hearing for disrespectful, provoking behavior, violating the chain of command, blaming management and having a negative attitude, according to a copy of the notification obtained by the Herald. He was promptly fired that evening and ordered to stay in his cabin.
Zuterek was originally supposed to disembark the ship on March 15, but his replacement’s flight was canceled, he said, as many countries had already closed their borders. The company gave him a glowing employee review and signed him on again.
“There was not a person (in management) who didn’t understand the risk,” Zuterek said. “They were not ready to handle it and they handled it in the worst possible scenario … We are still waiting here for somebody to open the door for us.”
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