This is the captain from the bridge.
41 people have been tested positive for coronavirus.
It's never gonna happen to me, couldn't happen to me.
That's what me and my friends were saying on the ship.
All guest please stay inside your staterooms
and do not go outside of your staterooms.
You just feel desperate when you're at sea.
Who's gonna let us disembark?
I don't think that they were terribly transparent
about what they knew when they knew it.
Carnival is, of course, the biggest cruise company
in the world and since this began,
their ships, more than any other company's
have been struck by these outbreaks of COVID
on board.
Hundreds of passengers on these ships
have been infected and some have even died.
And Bloomberg Business Week has been reporting in depth
on what went wrong and what's next for Carnival
navigating this very challenging crisis.
On February 3rd, the Diamond Princess
was around the coast of Japan.
It had made stops in Hong Kong,
it had gone to Taiwan and elsewhere.
It was suppose to be our last night on the cruise.
We were suppose to get off the next morning.
Around 6:30 that night, an announcement comes
throughout the entire ship.
A Hong Kong resident,
who traveled for five days on Diamond Princess
from Yokohama to Hong Kong tested positive for coronavirus.
Dear God. As you can see,
ladies and gentlemen, the situation is under control
and therefore, there are no reasons for concerns.
That's really when we knew that we probably
were not getting off the ship that next morning.
So, the ship cruises toward Japan
and finally anchors in the evening of February 3rd.
At that point, Carnival says the Japanese health officials
came aboard and started doing temperature checks,
health screening.
Unfortunately, according to passengers
this wasn't a really serious quarantine.
Passengers said that they were free to go about the ship.
My cabin mate and the other two guys
that we were traveling with were in the cabin next door.
They went out and they had a grand ole time that day.
You know, as most people do.
Eating in the restaurants, watching the live house bands.
Eventually, they find out that there is actually
cause for concern.
The Ministry of Health has notified us
that 10 people have tested positive for coronavirus.
All guest return to their cabin and remain there
for the time being.
We have confirmed 10 positive cases
and based on this, we are going to quarantine
the entire ship for a minimum of 14 days.
So, that's when it officially began.
We are currently in the middle of day two
of the 14 day long quarantine.
It is currently day three.
Apparently, 41 new cases on the ship.
There are 38 new people who have tested positive.
44 new cases.
66 additional positive cases of coronavirus.
We continued to see the numbers go every single day.
It was an emotional roller coaster.
In the end, more than 700 people were infected
and tragically, at least 11 people ended up dying
and this was just the beginning of the crisis
for this company.
I wanna highlight one of the most impressive
turnover stories of our year.
If not the most impressive turnaround.
I'm talking about Carnival CCL.
The world's largest cruise line.
Are you bigger than the U.S. Navy?
You know, that's a good question.
I never compared number of the ships but I doubt it.
The cruise industry is really massive.
Carnival Cruise, they say they see about
13 million people annually.
This is a booming market.
People love to cruise.
We've probably done two dozen cruises.
Sometimes we've done two or three in a year
if we're lucky.
Cruises are the perfect combination between
being convenient, being affordable, and allowing you
to just relax,
You pack once, you unpack once.
Your hotel moves with you, your restaurant moves with you.
Carnival is specifically, they own about
30 or 50% of the market.
Their annual revenue amounts to about 20 billion dollars
More recently, Carnival has run has run into some troubles.
You might have seen in the news in the 2010s.
They had a boat that capsized and actually sunk.
Killing about 30 people.
And then later on, they had a very high-profile incident
in which they lost power on the ship
and none of the plumping worked.
But under Arnold Donald, who is the current CEO of Carnival,
they've undergone a remarkable turnaround
since about 2013.
The more we give people the opportunity to connect
and experience the world together,
the more spectacular our world will be.
You saw the market Cap in the first five years
under of his tenure,
essentially doubled to about 50 billion dollars.
Ironically, leading into this whole crisis
that we've seen, you had Arnold Donald
promising that he was actually gonna correct things,
he had a plan in place to fix all these shortcuts
that Carnival had historically been taking.
Our task, our mission, double digit return
investment cap in the next three, four years.
Well, I wanna congratulate you on the textbook turn.
The whole trend has been up.
After the Diamond Princess ship,
about a month passes and then another ship,
the Grand Princess, they deal with essentially
the same crisis.
We boarded the ship in San Francisco and.
We did think there would be a little more enhanced
screening because of what had happened
on the Diamond Princess.
At a minimum, we thought they would have at least
taken our temperature as we boarded the ship
but that never happened.
And things just kind of exploded on our way home.
The first test are in and the coronavirus
is onboard the Grand Princess.
The Coast Guard delivered test in dramatic fashion.
And 21 people tested position for virus.
It just kind of escalated--
Quickly. Quickly.
They, you know, sequestered us and delivered food to us
in our rooms, and obviously, that was a major shock
of something's wrong.
So, like the Diamond Princess in Japan,
which they sailed immediately back to port,
the Grand Princess headed back to their home port
of San Francisco.
3,500 people stuck in that cruise ship off the coast
of California, they will finally be coming ashore.
All passengers and crew
will be tested for the coronavirus.
Those that need to be quarantined will be quarantined.
In the end, it proved a much smaller outbreak
than the Diamond Princess,
but that's most likely because not everyone chose
to get tested.
In the end, more than 130 people tested positive.
And at least five passed away.
As these issues are happening aboard the Grand Princess,
another ship owned by a different Carnival Cruise line,
which is Holland America Zaandam, is sailing around.
The cruise basically set sail,
more or less the same day that the U.S. State Department
warned people not to be going on cruises.
And the company just forged ahead with the cruise.
For some reason, they decided to keep going.
Life was good that first week.
Everything was great but I saw a friend's picture
about having issues getting toilet paper
and other things.
I was kind of concerned as to how this was gonna play out.
March 14th, the ship received word
that Chile was planning to close its ports
to any cruise ship and from then on out,
that ship was at sea with nowhere to port.
On March 22nd, the captain came on the announcement
and said, we have people sick with a flu-like illness,
everybody's gotta be confided to their quarters.
The whole ship's going into quarantine.
From March 22nd was kind of a,
I guess a different feel.
Didn't feel like a cruise anymore.
Sometimes I sat out on the deck at night
and I would just listen to the waves.
Now, sadly sometimes I listened also to a cascade
of people coughing.
After everybody was confided to quarters
for a few days, the captain came on the announcement
and said, you know, we're sorry to report
that four people had passed away over the last couple days.
So many crew on the Zaandam were getting sick,
that they were having trouble taking care
of all the passengers, and so the company made the decision
to bring in another ship called the Rotterdam.
And started ferrying passengers, five, six, 700 passengers
who seemed to be less sick.
They put them on the Rotterdam.
So, now they had two ships full of passengers
that could not come to port.
Panama didn't even want them to go through the canal.
Finally, the Panamanian Government decided
after all to let them go through the canal
and that's what happened.
Both their ships passed through the Canal
and they slowly made their way back to Florida.
After days at sea, with their fate up in the air,
a pair of Holland America cruise ships
were given clearance to dock at Port Everglades
Thursday afternoon.
Yay, we're back home.
Back to the States.
There were quite a number of people
that were actually sick and they were taken to hospitals.
And of course, they were those four people who passed away
that had be taken home, or find a way home.
We've gone through Ebola, Zika, MERs, SARs,
the industry, because we're global,
we have to deal with this stuff.
You know, it's been devastating, temporarily,
but the long-term future will be great,
as long as we all stand together.
So, since this crisis began,
Carnival, its business has really been suffering.
We've seen its stock really plummet quickly significantly.
We spent weeks talking to company executives
and the company was really upbeat and positive,
if not defiant.
The CEO, Arnold Donald kept saying,
look, back when this affected our first ship,
the world still hadn't known about coronavirus yet.
In his words, it was still a China issue.
We talked to the CDC,
we talked to the head of their Cruise Ship Task Force,
Dr. Cindy Friedman.
And she said, that excuse does not fly.
It would be one thing if it was only aboard
the Diamond Princess or even the Grand Princess,
those first two ships.
But the fact that this crisis continued
to affect Carnival afterward,
essentially Carnival should have known better.
I look forward to cruising again one day.
But you know, I realized the paradigm has changed.
It's very easy to say would you ever cruise again,
but I'm wondering, well, what's the world gonna look like?
Will we ever be going to concerts,
sporting events, you know it's not just cruising.
One thing that I do agree with Arnold Donald on,
he said this is an unprecedented generational
global event and I think that's totally spot on.
And in the years ahead, we're gonna look back
and we're gonna say who responded to that generational
crisis well and who did not.