RE: GRAND PRINCESS QUARANTINE
“...About 1,000 California residents from the ship will go into mandatory quarantine at Travis Air Force Base and Miramar Naval Air Station, the US Department of Health and Human Services said Sunday.
Passengers will be screened by the US Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC at the port, according to a statement from Travis Air Force Base.
“Only asymptomatic passengers will be transferred” to military bases for more screening and a 14-day quarantine, the statement said.
Residents of other states will complete their mandatory quarantine at Joint Base San Antonio Lackland in Texas or Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Georgia. Throughout the quarantine, passengers will be monitored for symptoms of coronavirus, DHHS said.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/08/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/index.html
Pennsylvania resident who worked convention in Palm Beach County tests positive for coronavirus... had been working in the Biogen vendor booth in the exhibitor’s area on Feb. 28.
I couldn’t figure out from the article what exactly they were doing; they said asymptomatic “cases” as if they were people who tested positive, but didn’t have symptoms; but I figured every person on board would be quarantined.
It appears, although we do not know, that the infection started with a number of crew members, one or more who apparently picked it up from a previous cruise.
Only 2 passengers so far have tested positive, but we’ll know more in 3 days as they are going to test every person.
This will be a great test case for how easy the virus spreads. We know that cruise ships are one of the worser-case scenarios (poorly run and sanitized senior centers seem to be worst-case).
The numbers from the Diamond Princess are “encouraging”. They tested virtually everybody (4061 tests). Of that number, 705 tested positive, or about 17%. IN a bad-case scenario, where nobody knew what was happening at the start, they had 17% spread, even when there were hundreds of people to spread it.
More interestingly, of that number, it appears 400+ were asymptomatic, which means they would not have been tested if not for being on the ship. Seven have died so far.
so, without full testing, you would have thought that about 300 people had it, and 7 of those died, for 2.3% death rate.
But with 700 tested positive, the death rate is 0.99%.
On this new cruise ship, with better insight and better quarantine methods, we had 21 cases so far out of 4000 people. Once we have full testing, we’ll know how much it spread, and that can give us better clues as to how “viral” this virus actually is, amongst a tightly packed crowd of people, some of whom are being careful about germs.