it’s sorrowful that one sailor apparently died of covid, but you’ll never have a more solid contagion case study.
about 12% infection rate (so far?) from 4845 total sailors resulting in 587 supposed infections (didn’t see details on testing). in very close ship’s quarters for long duration, i’d say that seems very low to me, but maybe others here know better having been on board ship.
.08% serious cases (4)
.02% fatality rate (1)
today is april 14, they pulled in to guam march 26. so 20-21 days since the captain called for help. three weeks. and before that how many days on deployment? in the south china sea on 2/18 according to fleet tracker. later a stop in vietnam in early march.
so i’ll guess that the first infection for early march. so about 21 days since the first infection. so 42 days to the present. that gives me a way to estimate infectivity using this exponential eq and solving for infectivity or X(R0?). X^41(sailor^days) = 587 sailors infected -> X = 587^(1/41) = 1.168 persons infected per day = estimated R0. that’s not very infective i think. so maybe it takes a pool of about 12 persons to infect 1 more per day as one interpretation of this statistic.
at least now i’ve got some rational idea of the infectivity of this new disease. given this estimate based on a solid case, i’m more confident that basic measures should safeguard me and my family in our normal lives until we get a vaccine for this, even if one of us gets it. based on other estimates of R0, this 1.168 is a lot less infective than say SARS which one site estimated to be 4.
Four sailors in the hospital out of almost 5,000 must mean something less than panic. "Captain Kirk to sick bay."