Lorraine Simpson shares her travel experience after testing positive for COVID-19 on a ship

‘We knew what we were getting into:’ Niagara travel expert on life quarantined aboard a ship

It wasn’t the dream cruise Lorraine Simpson planned for.

She spent 11 days on a ship, but instead of enjoying a cruise through the Caribbean, Simpson was holed up in a cabin on a three-masted ‘quarantine’ ship, docked on the island of Saint Martin.

A metal box, she called it: No open windows, no balcony, little television and sparse internet.

Rather than delighting in a holiday at sea, Simpson ended up a statistic.

Speaking on the phone from a beach bar in Saint Martin, where she and her partner Keith had to wait 15 days (from initial positive diagnosis) before being allowed to return to Canada, Simpson had no complaints.

More than that, the “Cityline” travel expert and travel agent was glad it happened to her.

“We knew what we were getting into, we knew what we were doing, and those procedures were put in place to protect people. And protect people they did,” said Simpson.

“It just so happened that they were protecting them against me.”

Prior to the cruise, Simpson, who owns Fonthill’s Travel Café, said the couple had limited social interactions with others. She recalls having a headache and assumed it was from stress, but still she underwent a PCR test that came back negative.

Upon arriving on the island, a rapid antigen test also showed negative results.

But before boarding the ship, every person underwent one more PCR test, and this time Simpson’s came back positive. They were the only two people taken off the cruise, and sent next door to the ‘quarantine ship.’

“Over the last year, literally, I have campaigned to be allowed to travel. I’ve said, we will follow any rule, any stipulation, any test … just allow us to travel. We’ll jump through all of those hoops and we’ll do it safely,” she said.

“There is no way that I can complain about being put into quarantine when it was me who wanted to travel and I knew those risks.”

After two nights apart (Keith later tested positive) — during which Simpson admits she was “a big baby” — they were moved to a shared room where they would spend the remainder of quarantine.

Both were asymptomatic, having received two doses of the vaccine and a booster shot.

The most exciting part was the daily arrival of a crossword puzzle, Simpson said.

“Literally five channels on television and they just repeated, repeated, repeated. Except for the BBC, which also repeated, but we do (know) everything about what was going on with the BBC,” said Simpson, laughing.

After a few days, they were allowed out of their rooms for 45 minutes a day for fresh air. Simpson took that opportunity to go live on Instagram, updating her 18,000 followers about quarantine life.

Prior to the pandemic, her job involved travelling once a month, amassing in 2019, she said, about 240,000 kilometres in total. But COVID-19 changed everything, cutting down travel bookings for agents, abruptly ending Simpson’s own travel and essentially eliminating her as a conference speaker.

When the travel advisory by the Canadian government was to ‘avoid all travel,’ she didn’t leave the country. But when Simpson left for the cruise in December (booked prior to Omicron), there was no travel ban in place, only a warning.

And it’s her job, Simpson said, to tell people what the world is like at all times — not just when she visits “the most fantastic places in the entire planet.”

Her job is to inform, test the waters and report back.

“I’m a travel journalist, therefore if I can tell the story, good or bad, it’s still a story to be told,” she said. “If you ask a cruise line, ‘what do you do if people test positive,’ they won’t tell you … ‘we put them onto another quarantine ship that floats in the water until they test negative.’”

After 11 days, both Simpson and Keith tested negative and spent their remaining vacation on the island. The final eye-opener for this experienced traveller was around insurance, which Simpson stressed is crucial for anyone travelling, especially now.

“I will never ever, ever, ever travel again without insurance because you just never know,” she said, adding most travel insurance does not include COVID-19.

“Check your insurance policies to make sure you absolutely are covered properly.”