7 ms·

'Sea Prison': Covid-19 has left hundreds of thousands of seafarers stranded

135 points by happy-go-lucky 6y ago

notafraudster 6y ago
This is an aside to the overall story, but > At any given time, there are more than 1.4 million seafarers plying the world's waterways, according to the International Chamber of Shipping. I mean, I guess this is obvious because SOMEONE has to ship all the stuff everywhere, but that's a truly crazy number of people to me. I guess it goes to show that the oceans are almost unfathomably huge that they can still be completely empty, even though a million people are living there on a daily basis.
- sharkweek 6y ago
  There's that famous story of that Marine who fell off a boat and survived at sea for 36 hours. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-11-30-9511300155-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-11-30-951130... I cannot for a second imagine the absolute horror of feeling THAT alone with god knows what beneath you. But imagine the good fortune required for a random fishing boat to pass by and find you. Or this guy who fell off a fishing boat in the middle of the night and survived, two sharks at one point circling him: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/a-speck-in-the-sea.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/a-speck-in-the-s...
  - optimalsolver 6y ago
    Relevant username. Also, that guy who survived in a pocket of air in a capsized boat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oqnpEozQYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oqnpEozQYo
- dalbasal 6y ago
  The vast majority of them are along shipping routes, which are generally pretty crowded.. at least relative to the open ocean.
- handedness 6y ago
  For context, that's roughly comparable to the respective populations of Equatorial Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, or Estonia.
- ryan_j_naughton 6y ago
  1.4 million is an exceptionally small number of people compared to the size of the oceans. You could fit all 7+ billion humans in New Zealand if we all lived as densely as Manhattan. [1] So 1.4 million people on the oceans is still virtually empty overall. Think about it this way. There are 3.2 million Mongolians and Mongolia is quite large -- thus, Mongolia is extremely empty. There are less than half as many seafarers as Mongolians, and they are spread over a much larger area. That being said -- those seafarers are actually mostly just in shipping lanes -- which are actually quite crowded. So crowded such that when they intersect with whale migratory routes, the likelihood of impacts is extremely high. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3016331/think-the-world-is-crowded-you-could-fit-the-entire-human-race-in-new-zealand https://www.fastcompany.com/3016331/think-the-world-is-crowd...
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    I'm just trying to imagine a city the size of New Zealand, Australia devoted to agriculture and the rest of the planet devoted to nature. That would be quite a statement with respect to stewardship of the planet.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      Can’t we choose places that are a little closer to the rest of the planet?
      - jacquesm 6y ago
        No, that's the beauty of it :)
      - jacobr1 6y ago
        If the point is the keep them as a nature preserve, their distance is probably a feature.
        Aeolun 6y ago
        I kind of want some nature in my life. Cities with the density of Tokyo or New York aren’t exactly known for that, so it has to be in reach.
- elorant 6y ago
  1.4 million people though doesn't equal 1.4 million ships. Divide it by let's say 15 people per ship and then all you have is a little less than 100k ships. Which doesn't sound like a lot.
- aaron695 6y ago
  There's about the same number of people (not workers) in the air at any time. And the air is orders of magnitude bigger. Which is cool, we got our flying city, but unfortunately we made it evenly distributed.
  - ehnto 6y ago
    Looking at Flight Radar, at least pre covid, was absolutely astounding every time. The scale of humanity is really incredible to me. There are more people in the air than live in my city. When I first flew to a big city, Osaka, I flew over 3000km of desert before even getting out of my country, and then bam, everything was absolutely infested with life and activity. More 'stuff' than I had ever seen. Looking at Flight radar not long ago, I saw the veritable stream of Japan Post cargo planes one after the other flying into HK or China, I forget. I remember thinking that just the postage was more planes than were aloft where I live for all commercial, travel and personal activity combined.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dalbasal 6y ago
It's sad, but at this point, I don't think we should let them back ashore. There's a point at which these sea people can't really adjust and are a danger to society. Something similar happened 3198 years ago and it collapsed all major civilizations. Egypt was never the same again. We'll have to try seasteading or something.
- joshu 6y ago
  i applaud the obscureness of this joke. (for everyone else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples )
- gabereiser 6y ago
  >sea people can't really adjust and are a danger to society haha pure gold.
- qq4 6y ago
  Wow haha, only on HN would I read a sea peoples joke. Did you also watch that informative YouTube lecture [0] or did you find out about them elsewhere? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4
  - etc-hosts 6y ago
    personally I learned more from https://youtu.be/B965f8AcNbw https://youtu.be/B965f8AcNbw and https://twitter.com/Fall_of_Civ_Pod https://twitter.com/Fall_of_Civ_Pod
- eftychis 6y ago
  Like other commenters I bow to the sea people. Seriously, I hope we find a solution for this situation. It sucks being away from home.
draw_down 6y ago
At a certain point whatever COVID risk this prevents is surpassed by the inhumanity of not letting these people go to their homes, to see their families and loved ones. I think a lot of what has been done in the past year will not be judged kindly by history. Bare life is not the only thing that matters.
ForHackernews 6y ago
I don't see how they can justify keeping these people trapped on ships while plenty of business and leisure travellers jet back and forth around the world. I'd understand if we were actually enforcing a real quarantine with closed borders, but we're not. What makes these maritime workers such a greater risk? Is it just that they're not wealthy citizens of western nations?
- msandford 6y ago
  I think the huge risk is that it takes days or weeks to travel between ports thus giving the virus time to incubate and show itself unlike flyers. We can't have people who mostly aren't a threat causing problems! Seriously these people present less of a threat than jet travel but they are decidedly blue collar. Maybe that's the distinction?
  - lambda_obrien 6y ago
    It's even easier than that: quarantine any ship that has made port in the last 2 weeks and the crew was allowed to disembark and let any ship with no sign of disease where the crew has been onboard for 2 weeks to disembark. Then, the crews can disembark at least every 2 weeks, and it's pretty simple to verify whether a ship has allowed it's crew to disembark; check their port logs.
    - closeparen 6y ago
      Change that to forty days and you’ve got the literal, original meaning of the word “quarantine.”
- petertodd 6y ago
  It's simple: they can't. Anywhere with non-trivial amounts of community transmission would have negligible additional risk by allowing those workers to enter, especially if symptoms are screened. A handful of new cases is a drop in a very big bucket. That's been true over almost the whole world for months, because covid has spread to pretty much the entire world. These workers have been imprisoned because of politics, not science.
b0rsuk 6y ago
Do yourself a favor and watch the 2015 Turkish movie "Sarmasik" (Ivy). It's about a crew stuck aboard a stranded ship. It's well made and supposedly also a political commentary on Erdogan and other things.
stosto88 6y ago
Lol gtfo
stosto88 6y ago
Maaaan gtfo
userbinator 6y ago
On the other hand, I'd love to be able to stay far away from the rest of society on a ship along with other uninfecteds until the pandemic is over.
tokai 6y ago
Similar things happen without covid involved. Lack of pay and upkeep for fuel can strand ship and crew in a foreign harbour. Back in 2002 a Russian transport ship and crew spend the summer moored by my birth town without being able to leave the ship. The crew hadn't received any pay for 9 months, lacked provisions, and refused to keep working. The shipping company send some goons to ruff them up, but ended getting arrested and deported. Eventually they sailed on, though I don't know the outcome of the conflict. At the end of the 10's I attended a party on a large Russian freightship (in another city). The crew and ship had apparently been abandoned by their company without any communication, and they had been stuck on the ship for half a year. Never got it confirmed but I think they had made a deal with the party organisers to host parties to cover food cost and tickets home. Shipping is a hard business.

This is an aside to the overall story, but > At any given time, there are more than 1.4 million seafarers plying the world's waterways, according to the International Chamber of Shipping. I mean, I guess this is obvious because SOMEONE has to ship all the stuff everywhere, but that's a truly crazy number of people to me. I guess it goes to show that the oceans are almost unfathomably huge that they can still be completely empty, even though a million people are living there on a daily basis.

sharkweek 6y ago
There's that famous story of that Marine who fell off a boat and survived at sea for 36 hours. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-11-30-9511300155-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-11-30-951130... I cannot for a second imagine the absolute horror of feeling THAT alone with god knows what beneath you. But imagine the good fortune required for a random fishing boat to pass by and find you. Or this guy who fell off a fishing boat in the middle of the night and survived, two sharks at one point circling him: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/a-speck-in-the-sea.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/a-speck-in-the-s...
- optimalsolver 6y ago
  Relevant username. Also, that guy who survived in a pocket of air in a capsized boat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oqnpEozQYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oqnpEozQYo
dalbasal 6y ago
The vast majority of them are along shipping routes, which are generally pretty crowded.. at least relative to the open ocean.
handedness 6y ago
For context, that's roughly comparable to the respective populations of Equatorial Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, or Estonia.
ryan_j_naughton 6y ago
1.4 million is an exceptionally small number of people compared to the size of the oceans. You could fit all 7+ billion humans in New Zealand if we all lived as densely as Manhattan. [1] So 1.4 million people on the oceans is still virtually empty overall. Think about it this way. There are 3.2 million Mongolians and Mongolia is quite large -- thus, Mongolia is extremely empty. There are less than half as many seafarers as Mongolians, and they are spread over a much larger area. That being said -- those seafarers are actually mostly just in shipping lanes -- which are actually quite crowded. So crowded such that when they intersect with whale migratory routes, the likelihood of impacts is extremely high. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3016331/think-the-world-is-crowded-you-could-fit-the-entire-human-race-in-new-zealand https://www.fastcompany.com/3016331/think-the-world-is-crowd...
- jacquesm 6y ago
  I'm just trying to imagine a city the size of New Zealand, Australia devoted to agriculture and the rest of the planet devoted to nature. That would be quite a statement with respect to stewardship of the planet.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Can’t we choose places that are a little closer to the rest of the planet?
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      No, that's the beauty of it :)
    - jacobr1 6y ago
      If the point is the keep them as a nature preserve, their distance is probably a feature.
      - Aeolun 6y ago
        I kind of want some nature in my life. Cities with the density of Tokyo or New York aren’t exactly known for that, so it has to be in reach.
elorant 6y ago
1.4 million people though doesn't equal 1.4 million ships. Divide it by let's say 15 people per ship and then all you have is a little less than 100k ships. Which doesn't sound like a lot.
aaron695 6y ago
There's about the same number of people (not workers) in the air at any time. And the air is orders of magnitude bigger. Which is cool, we got our flying city, but unfortunately we made it evenly distributed.
- ehnto 6y ago
  Looking at Flight Radar, at least pre covid, was absolutely astounding every time. The scale of humanity is really incredible to me. There are more people in the air than live in my city. When I first flew to a big city, Osaka, I flew over 3000km of desert before even getting out of my country, and then bam, everything was absolutely infested with life and activity. More 'stuff' than I had ever seen. Looking at Flight radar not long ago, I saw the veritable stream of Japan Post cargo planes one after the other flying into HK or China, I forget. I remember thinking that just the postage was more planes than were aloft where I live for all commercial, travel and personal activity combined.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dalbasal 6y ago

It's sad, but at this point, I don't think we should let them back ashore. There's a point at which these sea people can't really adjust and are a danger to society. Something similar happened 3198 years ago and it collapsed all major civilizations. Egypt was never the same again. We'll have to try seasteading or something.

joshu 6y ago
i applaud the obscureness of this joke. (for everyone else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples )
gabereiser 6y ago
>sea people can't really adjust and are a danger to society haha pure gold.
qq4 6y ago
Wow haha, only on HN would I read a sea peoples joke. Did you also watch that informative YouTube lecture [0] or did you find out about them elsewhere? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4
- etc-hosts 6y ago
  personally I learned more from https://youtu.be/B965f8AcNbw https://youtu.be/B965f8AcNbw and https://twitter.com/Fall_of_Civ_Pod https://twitter.com/Fall_of_Civ_Pod
eftychis 6y ago
Like other commenters I bow to the sea people. Seriously, I hope we find a solution for this situation. It sucks being away from home.

draw_down 6y ago

At a certain point whatever COVID risk this prevents is surpassed by the inhumanity of not letting these people go to their homes, to see their families and loved ones. I think a lot of what has been done in the past year will not be judged kindly by history. Bare life is not the only thing that matters.

ForHackernews 6y ago

I don't see how they can justify keeping these people trapped on ships while plenty of business and leisure travellers jet back and forth around the world. I'd understand if we were actually enforcing a real quarantine with closed borders, but we're not. What makes these maritime workers such a greater risk? Is it just that they're not wealthy citizens of western nations?

msandford 6y ago
I think the huge risk is that it takes days or weeks to travel between ports thus giving the virus time to incubate and show itself unlike flyers. We can't have people who mostly aren't a threat causing problems! Seriously these people present less of a threat than jet travel but they are decidedly blue collar. Maybe that's the distinction?
- lambda_obrien 6y ago
  It's even easier than that: quarantine any ship that has made port in the last 2 weeks and the crew was allowed to disembark and let any ship with no sign of disease where the crew has been onboard for 2 weeks to disembark. Then, the crews can disembark at least every 2 weeks, and it's pretty simple to verify whether a ship has allowed it's crew to disembark; check their port logs.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    Change that to forty days and you’ve got the literal, original meaning of the word “quarantine.”
petertodd 6y ago
It's simple: they can't. Anywhere with non-trivial amounts of community transmission would have negligible additional risk by allowing those workers to enter, especially if symptoms are screened. A handful of new cases is a drop in a very big bucket. That's been true over almost the whole world for months, because covid has spread to pretty much the entire world. These workers have been imprisoned because of politics, not science.

b0rsuk 6y ago

Do yourself a favor and watch the 2015 Turkish movie "Sarmasik" (Ivy). It's about a crew stuck aboard a stranded ship. It's well made and supposedly also a political commentary on Erdogan and other things.

stosto88 6y ago

Lol gtfo

stosto88 6y ago

Maaaan gtfo

userbinator 6y ago

On the other hand, I'd love to be able to stay far away from the rest of society on a ship along with other uninfecteds until the pandemic is over.

tokai 6y ago

Similar things happen without covid involved. Lack of pay and upkeep for fuel can strand ship and crew in a foreign harbour. Back in 2002 a Russian transport ship and crew spend the summer moored by my birth town without being able to leave the ship. The crew hadn't received any pay for 9 months, lacked provisions, and refused to keep working. The shipping company send some goons to ruff them up, but ended getting arrested and deported. Eventually they sailed on, though I don't know the outcome of the conflict. At the end of the 10's I attended a party on a large Russian freightship (in another city). The crew and ship had apparently been abandoned by their company without any communication, and they had been stuck on the ship for half a year. Never got it confirmed but I think they had made a deal with the party organisers to host parties to cover food cost and tickets home. Shipping is a hard business.