with the port of miami with more. good morning. good morning. just like in every state across the country the highly infectious omicron variant surged on cruise ships in despite requirements all crew and passengers vaccinated and everyone show a negative covid test before they even board the ship. a policy which expires saturday. according to the cdc the past two weeks have shown a 30-fold increase in positive cases on the big vessels. in the first two weeks of december 160 positives. second two weeks of december that number shot up to 5,000. stewart has seen a dozen cruises since last summer when the industry resumed sailing after the pandemic froze it for more than a year. he says he feels safer at sea than on land. the occurrences of covid on board ships is lower on a ship than what we re seeing on land.
meaning that despite the vaccine which if you ve been recently boosted may slow it to some extent it will spread anyway. if the whole goal is workplace safety. first of all you would have to say did you have a booster two weeks ago, you would have to know whether you recently had infection and micromanage it. even then it will spread in the workplace. it is not an issue of workplace safety. one example. you can t ban smoking but you can say you can t smoke in the workplace or public areas because that second hand smoke can affect others. if i can t stop the spread of omicron using this vaccine, then i can t mandate it at all. bill: okay. we read a story last hour by the university of pittsburgh saying if you don t have a vaccine you can t continue your enrollment at the school as a student. that s kind of stunning. see where that goes. andy, two things on the gorsuch deal dpr the oral arguments he had a change. rarely ever happens, right? on monday to put out a
and intend to go in may. we need to be cautious but not interrupt our lives completely over this. dana: we learned something about you. you are a cruiser. okay. we got that. do you feel the same way about air travel still? i do feel good about air travel. the ventilation systems in modern aircraft are very excellent with filtration. it is reasonable to wear a mask with omicron. it depends on your individual risk as well. if you re one of the people highly likely with the multiple co-morbidities even if you get omicron which is much less severe you could wind up in the hospital be careful. for the general normal traveler who may have a mild comorbidity the filtration in the planes combined with mask is highly protective and feel very safe doing that. dana: a lot of people you used to work with in the public health sector are suggesting we re going to have to learn to