There are now two cruise ships, one docked in NJ with up to 12 probable cases of coronavirus and one docked in Japan with about 40.

Many of the affected passengers are reported to be Chinese citizens who developed symptoms on board.  Obviously, the close, packed confines of a cruise ship are a -great- place for a droplet infection like flu or coronavirus to spread quickly.  Several GI viruses are already notorious for causing cruise ship outbreaks for that reason.

As discussed with the last update, the big threat of this coronavirus may be its high severe disease attack rate.  Again, that would explain why 400 million and counting Chinese citizens are being asked to stay in their homes for a few weeks (to starve the virus out)—the high severe disease rate overruns the hospital system, and the death rate creeps up to about 2% because there are not enough critical care beds for the severely sick.

A cruise ship in quarantine is asking for a whole lot of its passengers to get coronavirus.  By report, Japan is refusing to let anyone but Japanese citizens disembark.  No word on NJ, but reports are they took the 12 possible cases off the ship.

Keeping the other passengers in “Club Fed” for a couple weeks until they are out of the incubation period is not a bad idea.  The strategy for the rest of the world -has- to be to keep the cases to a manageable trickle.  A cruise ship full of coronavirus is high risk to overwhelm critical care availability no matter where it docks, or let too many patient zeros out into the community if they are not carefully followed and stay isolated after their cruise ship exposure if you let everyone disembark.  You don’t know right now how many had it.  China is having their problem precisely because too many patient zeros were out before the threat was identified. 

Just my thoughts.

And maybe reschedule a cruise if you’ve got one coming up soon…

<Paladin>