Good morning. President Trump said he was suspending his plan for the U.S. Navy to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz. And, in Indiana, challengers he backed mostly won primary races. We’ll get to more, below — including my favorite recipe for beef and broccoli. But first, let’s go to sea.
Seeking safe harborIt’s the plot of a horror movie: A mysterious virus creeps through a luxury cruise ship that’s following the spring migration of ocean birds out of the Antarctic. The bug, which can cause lung and kidney failure, isn’t supposed to be able to leap between humans. Except maybe it can? Three passengers are dead, and four more have fallen ill. The hantavirus crisis aboard the Hondius has been unfolding for nearly a month, and the uninfected passengers have been stuck aboard the whole time. The ship now sits at anchor near Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa, and was supposed to sail to the Canary Islands yesterday. Spanish officials said the vessel would need to be inspected before they could decide where exactly it might go. Officials from Oceanwide Expeditions, the ship’s operator, said they had locked down the cruise with “isolation measures, hygiene protocols and medical monitoring.” The World Health Organization advises against panic. “Based on the current information, including how hantavirus spreads, W.H.O. assesses the risk to the global population from this event as low,” the agency said yesterday. Still, yikes. Can you imagine? These trips are meant to be edifying, adventuresome, cool. The company that runs this one offers cruises for tens of thousands of dollars. (The Hondius is a handsome ship.) It offers quiet luxury. “The point of a cruise like this isn’t cocktails by the pool or reconfigured versions of Broadway shows,” Amy Virshup, The Times’s travel editor, told me. “It’s to explore faraway places, to learn about them from scientists, naturalists, people who can talk about the ecosystems you’re observing.” Instead, voyagers got a seaborne season of “The White Lotus,” with pathogens. Here’s what we know. The virus may be jumping between people. Typically, the microbe spreads from rodent droppings. Humans contract the disease when they inhale fine particles of dung or urine. But the W.H.O. isn’t ruling out human-to-human transmission here. “Some of the cases had very close contact with each other,” a health official said, adding that one couple may have been infected before they boarded the ship. Hantavirus is dangerous. The disease may be uncommon, but the C.D.C. says it has a fatality rate of 35 percent in the U.S. (it’s closer to 15 percent in Asia and Europe). It presents early on as a fever with chills, body aches, headaches. Shortness of breath follows and, in some instances, lung or heart failure. There’s no drug to treat it, so doctors have to rely on oxygen and heart-lung machines if things get bad. Last year, colleagues reminded me, Betsy Arakawa, wife of the actor Gene Hackman, died from the effects of the virus. Cruising is back. After getting walloped by the coronavirus pandemic, the cruise industry now sees more people aboard its ships than ever before. Some 35 million people took cruises in 2024, according to the industry’s trade association, up from 30 million in 2019. (Most people go to the Caribbean: water slides, rum punches, repeat. “Exploration” cruises of the sort the Hondius takes to the Antarctic and the Arctic carry about 1 percent of global passengers.) Quarantines are scary. Being confined to quarters on a ship infected with a virus can be terrifying. In 2020, my colleague Motoko Rich reported on a vessel quarantined in Japan at the start of the pandemic. “I know that stress and anxiety compromise my immune system,” one passenger told her. “But every day it’s anxiety-provoking when we see the ambulances line up on the side of the ship.” Jake Rosmarin, a travel influencer aboard the Hondius today, echoed that anxiety in a tearful social media post on Monday. “All we want right now is to feel safe, to have clarity and to get home,” he said.
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Here’s my super-simple recipe for a Chinese-takeout standby: beef and broccoli. The chef Jonathan Wu taught me the velveting technique that keeps the meat tender, and the chef Dale Talde taught me to swirl a little cold butter into the sauce at the end to make it luxurious. I figured out how to add chile crisp for spice all by myself. |
