In the hospital, when somebody calls “code blue” in most facilities that means “cardiac arrest” or something of similar severity. On cruise ships, “code red” is the highest of three color codes (green and yellow are 1 and 2), all of which have to do with sickness (norovirus) and/or cleanliness — even though in some places on land “code red” means fire.
The thing to remember about hearing “code red” when you’re cruising is that it’s not a panic situation.
Our colleague Phil Reimer, who writes a Ports and Bows column in newspapers across Canada and also does daily cruise blogs, experienced this first hand last week. On Holland America’s Nieuw Amsterdam, passengers were told the ship was sailing under a “code red.” The reason was that 21 of the 2,000-plus passengers were suffering from norovirus, a gastro-intestinal condition not unlike a case of the ‘flu.
To ship personnel, code red means the infected passengers are quarantined in their staterooms, the healthy passengers are not allowed to dish up their own food in the buffet, and the ship undergoes an extensive or “super” cleaning. On most ships, code red is implemented if there are five or more cases of norovirus on successive days.
The captain told Phil the Nieuw Amsterdam could sail around the world under a code red.
So if you’re on a ship and you hear “code red” — it’s nothing like a “code blue.”
Now, don’t you feel better already?