The Ruby Princess will stay docked in Australia until health authorities can work out how to get the crew safely home.
The cruise ship is quarantined at Port Kembla in Wollongong and was supposed to set sail by Sunday, exactly a month after its fateful arrival.
About 1,100 crew members are still on board, 153 of whom have coronavirus, and rigiourous medical checks have delayed its departure.
NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller was been negotiating with the crew’s home countries for the past week about mass repatriation on chartered flights.
The Ruby Princess would then be sailed back to its port of origin by a skeleton crew who are immune to the virus having already recovered from it.
An antibody test developed by Westmead Hospital in Sydney is being used to screen crew members for signs they once had coronavirus.
However, they are struggling to find enough of them to pilot the ship home, which is further delaying its departure.
All other cruise ships moored off NSW left earlier this month after crew were swapped between the vessels by police boats in the dead of night.
More than 600 infections and 21 deaths are linked to the Ruby Princess after almost 2,700 passengers were allowed to disembark in Sydney Harbour on March 19.
No health checks were done on any of the passengers and many got on domestic flights or cross-state trains while unknowingly infected.
Coronavirus spread quickly and easily on board as passengers said they were not told it might be on board or that social distancing was necessary.
Photos also showed hundreds of passengers crowding together to applaud kitchen staff, and crew partying with passengers the day before it docked in Sydney.
This was despite the crew taking dozens of swabs from passengers with flu-like symptoms to be tested after the ship returned to port.
Three patients who died in Tasmania are believed to be the source of an outbreak that infected 45 medical staff and shut down two hospitals in Burnie last week.
Others had to be tracked down all over Australia and some even flew home overseas.
Passengers Steve Lazaru and Chung Chen, 64, died after returning to the U.S. and Mr Chen’s family is suing the ship’s operator Princess Cruises.
NSW Police are conducting a homicide investigation into the fiasco, raiding the ship and surveying passengers on two recent cruises.
They were asked whether they saw signs of anyone with coronavirus symptoms on board, about cleaning standards, and if they have videos from the voyage.
Mr Fuller said his team had already identified the likely source of the virus on the ship.
‘At this stage, we would think that it was probably a crew member working in the galley,’ he said earlier this week.
However, legal experts told Daily Mail Australia the investigation would not lead to any criminal charges and it was unclear why police were investigating at all.
There are three cruise ships in quarantine in Australian waters – the Ruby Princess, the Artania, and the Caledonian Sky.
Source: Mail Online