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A Holland America cruise ship sits stranded off Panama, carrying two confirmed coronavirus cases and nearly 150 passengers and crew battling flu-like symptoms.
The MS Zaandam left Buenos Aires on March 7 with 1,243 passengers and 586 crew aboard, bound for what should have been a routine South American voyage ending in San Antonio, Chile, on March 21. Instead, as COVID-19 spread across the globe and nations sealed their borders, the ship was turned away from port after port. It now sits off the Pacific coast of Panama, unable to dock, unable to disembark its sick, and unable yet to pass through the Panama Canal.
- Holland America confirmed on March 27 that four elderly passengers have died aboard the Zaandam, at least two people have tested positive for COVID-19, and nearly 140 to 148 passengers and crew are reporting respiratory or flu-like symptoms.
- Guests have been confined to their cabins since March 22, with medical teams onboard working through limited testing supplies and medical equipment.
- Holland America sent the sister ship MS Rotterdam, loaded with medical staff, diagnostic kits, and relief supplies, to rendezvous with the Zaandam at sea and begin transferring healthy, asymptomatic passengers off the stricken vessel.
A Voyage That Never Reached Its Destination
The Zaandam was never supposed to be at the center of an international health emergency. Its passengers boarded in Argentina expecting a scenic South American cruise, not a two-week confinement drifting off Central America. As Chile, Peru, and other regional governments moved to shut their harbors to foreign vessels amid the expanding pandemic, the ship found itself with nowhere to go, carrying more than 1,800 people between passengers and crew and no port willing to take them.
The broader picture, as ABC News correspondent Roxana Saberi has reported, is one of a virus advancing well beyond U.S. borders. Around the world, nearly 28,000 people have died from the coronavirus, with Spain now recording the world’s second-highest death toll at nearly 5,000, trailing only Italy. The Zaandam’s isolation at sea is a direct symptom of that same border-slamming response playing out from Santiago to Madrid.
The Toll Onboard
By March 27, the numbers had turned grim. Four elderly passengers had died, and at least two individuals had tested positive for COVID-19, though Holland America’s onboard testing capacity remains severely limited. Between 140 and 148 passengers and crew are showing respiratory or flu-like symptoms, and everyone aboard has been ordered to stay in their cabins since March 22, an isolation passengers describe as marked by anxiety as much as illness.
Guests confined to their cabins since March 22 describe conditions marked by intense anxiety and isolation as medical teams struggle with limited testing and medical supplies.
Sending in the Rotterdam
Holland America’s answer was to dispatch its sister ship, the MS Rotterdam, out to meet the Zaandam off Panama’s coast. The Rotterdam arrived carrying medical personnel, diagnostic test kits, and additional relief supplies, and the two ships began a high-stakes at-sea transfer, moving hundreds of asymptomatic, healthy passengers off the Zaandam and onto the Rotterdam in an effort to separate the uninfected from those falling ill.
Both vessels are now attempting to transit the Panama Canal en route to Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. That transit initially stalled, however, after Panamanian health and sanitary authorities moved to bar vessels carrying active infections from passing through the canal, leaving both ships waiting on clearance even as conditions onboard the Zaandam continued to deteriorate.
A Global Pattern of Ports Shut Tight
The Zaandam’s ordeal is not an isolated case. Cruise operators across the industry are running into the same wall of closed borders and shuttered harbors that has followed the pandemic’s spread through Europe, Latin America, and beyond, a pattern visible in how states are imposing stricter coronavirus restrictions as infections continue to spike at home while Russia and other nations report climbing case totals of their own. For a ship with no country willing to receive it, that global lockdown mentality has turned a pleasure cruise into a weeks-long standoff at sea.
For now, the Zaandam and Rotterdam remain queued off Panama, waiting on the canal authorities to grant passage so both ships can finally push on toward Fort Lauderdale — the only path left that gets the sick off the water and into an actual hospital.
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