Cruise ships still pose a health disaster threat: Ship sanitation officer

Erin Montgomery still gets emotional when she remembers her last trip on the MS Zaandam cruise ship.

“It was horrible,” she tells The Post, bursting into tears. Montgomery, then in her mid-50s, worked as the ship’s sanitation officer. “Having people die on you and you’re helpless to do anything about it.”

On March 27th, 2020, the Zaandam, a luxury cruise line owned by Carnival Corp., was anchored off Panama City. With 1,242 passengers and 586 crew members, they had set sail just three weeks earlier.

Few people realized it at first, but “COVID-19 was tearing through the Zaandam,” write investigative journalists Michael Smith and Jonathan Franklin in their new book “Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic” (Doubleday), out now.

The virus crept in slowly, infecting passengers and crew who assumed they were safe when corporate doctors back on land downplayed the risks. That sense of security came crashing down on March 27, when the captain made a chilling announcement over the ship’s loudspeakers: “Unfortunately, four of our guests have passed away.”

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