Of course, my immediate thought upon learning that the Oasis of the Seas has a twin sister being built in Finland was "so twice as many people can get food poisoning..." This is, of course, hyperbole, as the number of passengers of cruise vessels that get sick per year is very small. Nevertheless, occasionally some food on a cruise ship goes bad and everyone on board eats it and gets sick. The ship pulls into the nearest port and unloads hundreds of passengers into the local medical system.
But if Oasis of the Seas, or her sister ship Allure of the Seas, were to suddenly have a passenger-wide food poisoning epidemic, could the medical facilities at some watering-hole Caribbean island support that many patients? The Oasis is designed to hold 8,300 people including crew.
This problem might solve itself, really, as the Oasis and Allure are so massive, so gigantic, that they might not be able to pull into harbor of many islands in the Caribbean, and would therefore be forced to enter larger ports where higher-capacity medical care is available.
But as the "Oasis class" fleet grows from one to two, ask the question I asked before: how long before a single individual buys one to stroke their wealthy egos? With the price tag in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion the Oasis class ships aren't impossibly expensive, and with Royal Caribbean having trouble maintaining stock value, the scenario where a multi-billionaire buys one is becoming more and more plausible every day. Maybe the global economy needs to recover first, but I humbly submit that it will happen.
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