Your new post is loading...
Close confines help the virus to spread, but closed environments are also an ideal place to study how the new coronavirus behaves. When COVID-19 was detected among passengers on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, the vessel offered a rare opportunity to understand features of the new coronavirus that are hard to investigate in the wider population. Some of the first studies from the ship — where some 700 people were infected — have revealed how easily the virus spreads, provided estimates of the disease’s severity and allowed researchers to investigate the share of infections with no symptoms......
When COVID-19 was detected among passengers on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, the vessel offered a rare opportunity to understand features of the new coronavirus that are hard to investigate in the wider population. Some of the first studies from the ship — where some 700 people were infected — have revealed how easily the virus spreads, provided estimates of the disease’s severity and allowed researchers to investigate the share of infections with no symptoms...
Japanese officials performed more than 3,000 tests on the Diamond Princess, starting with older passengers and those with symptoms. Some passengers were tested more than once, offering insight into the virus’s spread over time. Testing almost all of the passengers and crew helped researchers to understand a key blind spot in many infectious-disease outbreaks — how many people are actually infected, including those who have mild symptoms or none at all. These cases often go undetected in the general population...
Using the Diamond Princess data, a team reports in Eurosurveillance1 that by 20 February, 18% of all infected people on the ship had no symptoms. “That is a substantial number,” says co-author Gerardo Chowell, a mathematical epidemiologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta. But the passengers included a large number of elderly people, who are most likely to develop severe disease if infected, so the share of asymptomatic people in the general population is likely to be higher, he says. Another team used data from the ship to estimate2 that the proportion of deaths among confirmed cases in China, the case fatality rate (CFR), was around 1.1% — much lower than the 3.8% estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO)....
See also Preprint of Study Cited in medRxiv:
: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773
