I came down with the flu while on board a cruise ship as a teenager and was quarantined for 24 hours - here's what my experience was like

David Kalish

The author on Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas in 2010.

• In 2010, when I was 16, I came down with the stomach flu while on board Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas with my family.
• After visiting the ship's infirmary, I was put under a 24-hour quarantine to make sure my sickness passed before I could walk the ship again.
• I spent the next day watching free movies and was released that evening, once I showed no more signs of symptoms.
• The cruise staff also took other precautions, like asking where I'd been on the ship that day and checking in on me to make sure I was adhering to my quarantine.
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As soon as you recover from being sick, your mind tends to block out all the worst parts of it - the nauseating sensations, the feelings of hopelessness, the fear of never being well again.

Because of that, I don't remember much about my first 48 hours on Oasis of the Seas in December 2010. I might have been on vacation, but I had the stomach flu, sentencing me to a 24-hour quarantine on the ship.

In recent weeks, quarantines on cruise ships haven't been limited to the unlucky passengers who step on board with a stomach bug. They've been far more widespread and concerning than that, such as in the case of the Diamond Princess quarantine in Japan last month, which started small and spread - quickly.

On February 1, a man tested positive for coronavirus six days after leaving the Diamond Princess, forcing Japan's Ministry of Health to place the entire boat under a 14-day quarantine. By the end of the quarantine, more than 700 cases of coronavirus had been reported and six people had died. Since then, cruise ships have taken cautionary measures to ensure the safety of future passengers and prevent them from going through the same experience.

But quarantines on cruise ships are no new thing, even if they've taken on a new, more harrowing meaning as of late. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has an entire webpage devoted to guidance on how to handle and potentially quarantine general illnesses on cruise ships, because close-contact environments like that "can facilitate the transmission of influenza viruses and other respiratory viruses from person to person."

That's why, when I became ill on the Oasis of the Seas in 2010, it was off to isolation for me.

It's worth clarifying that I didn't get sick on the ship, but had contracted the illness before boarding - something my parents and I discovered after the fact. (Actually, we only really knew where it came from after I returned to school from winter break, spoke to two friends I'd hung out with before my trip, and found out they'd also spent the better part of their vacation huddled over a toilet.)

All we knew as we went to check in at the cruise-ship terminal that morning was that I might or might not have come down with food poisoning the night before, and I was feeling better.

Several hours later, when I started showing symptoms again, I was put under a 24-hour quarantine - an essential, if lonely, way to spend part of a supposed vacation.