I don’t know how the topic would have come up in the first place, but somehow my brother discovered that the cruise ship we were traveling on had thirty coffins on hand, just in case a passenger croaked.

Thirty.

Somehow that seems like an awful lot of deaths for what amounts to just over six days of vacation. The average mortality rate for the UK (it was a UK-based travel company) is somwhere around 738 deaths per 100,000 people. That works out to a tidy 0.738% of the population.

With a full cruise ship, there are about 1600 passengers on board. Which means that the cruise company is prepared for 1.875 % of their “population” to start the cruise but not to finish it. That’s just over 2.5 times the UK national average! If we throw the crew into the mix, the “expected” rate drops to 1.402%, still 1.9 times the national average in the UK.

Makes you wonder about the ship. Is there something we don’t know? Is the food a little “suspicious”? Is that why both my brother and I got sick during the cruise?