OK, here are my questions. We had a perfect petri-dish coronavirus disease (COVID-19) experiment with the cruise ship “Diamond Princess”. That’s the cruise ship that ended up in quarantine for a number of weeks after a number of people tested positive for the coronavirus. I got to wondering what the outcome of the experiment was.
As you might imagine, before they knew it was a problem, the epidemic raged on the ship, with infected crew members cooking and cleaning for the guests, people all eating together, close living quarters, lots of social interaction, and a generally older population. Seems like a perfect situation for an overwhelming majority of the passengers to become infected.
And despite that, some 83% (82.7% – 83.9%) of the passengers never got the disease at all … why?
Let me start by looking at the age distribution of the Diamond Princess, along with the equivalent age distribution for the entire US.
Figure 1. Number of passengers by age group on the Diamond Princess (solid) and expected number of passengers given current US population percentages (hatched).
When as a young man I lived in a port town with cruise ships calling, we used to describe the passengers as “newlyweds and nearlydeads”. Hmmm … through some improbable series of misunderstandings and coincidences, I’m in the orange zone now … but I digress …
What’s frightening about the Chinese Virus is the overwhelming amount of inconclusive data. We’re inundated with media speculation and hyperventilation, Chinese disinformation, and data that changes daily thanks to the treatment and quarantine initiatives governments are trying around the world.
The fact that the disease has different rates of contagion and mortality in different parts of the world makes things more confusing. We can understand why it exploded in China, a place of censored information, pollution, smoking, and primitive socialized medicine. But why was it so virulent in Italy?
Surely Italy’s socialized medicine is better than China's. Or is the problem Italy’s recent Silk Road Project agreement with China, which resulted in more than three-hundred-thousand Chinese workers entering Italy, mostly in the north, along with constant traffic between the two countries. Although the mainstream media celebrated the deal as a slap at Trump, in hindsight, it may have had disastrous consequences for Italy.
Fortunately, there is one almost “pure” location for coronavirus data, and that is Princess Cruise’s Diamond Princess cruise ship. This was the ship moored along California’s coast while the government tried to determine the best way to deal with a floating virus bomb. Writing at Watts Up With That, Willis Eischenbach looked at the Princess Cruise’s numbers and discovered some encouraging information:
Quote We had a perfect petri-dish coronavirus disease (COVID-19) experiment with the cruise ship “Diamond Princess”. That’s the cruise ship that ended up in quarantine for a number of weeks after a number of people tested positive for the coronavirus. I got to wondering what the outcome of the experiment was.
As you might imagine, before they knew it was a problem, the epidemic raged on the ship, with infected crew members cooking and cleaning for the guests, people all eating together, close living quarters, lots of social interaction, and a generally older population. Seems like a perfect situation for an overwhelming majority of the passengers to become infected.
And despite that, some 83% (82.7% – 83.9%) of the passengers never got the disease at all … why?
What an excellent question. Why did 83% of the ship's passengers walk away unscathed?
It’s an especially good question because the majority of passengers were in the 60-79 age group, weighted slightly more heavily towards the 70-79 cohort. In other words, by the time the ship docked, it should have been a floating morgue, but somehow it wasn’t.
When Eischenbach looked at those on the ship who did not get sick, he discovered something equally intriguing:
Quote [T]here’s not a whole lot of difference between young and old passengers in terms of how many didn’t get coronavirus. For example, sixty to sixty-nine-year-old passengers stayed healthier than teenagers. And three-quarters of the oldest group, those over eighty, didn’t get the virus.
And here’s where it gets really interesting because it has to do with the denominator — that is, the number of people who get sick. Because the Diamond Princess was monitored, we know precisely how many people got sick and we know that they would never have been noticed were they not on the ship:
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