Case Study Prompts Questions on Reliability of Daily COVID-19 Data

Almost 60 percent of the passengers and crew of a cruise ship tested positive for COVID-19 and a whopping 80 percent of those who tested positive showed no symptoms at all.

In a report, these findings were published in the journal Thorax, which led to the question of how rampant asymptomatic transmissions of the virus might be. How much gray area are are we not seeing?

The peer-reviewed study cited that these official cases are just selling short the overall number of infected individuals. Moreover, the paper gives a glimpse of how the transmission of COVID-19 through asymptomatic patients proceed, especially in an environment with a limited area such as a cruise ship.

Of the 217 passengers and crew on board, 128 tested positive for the virus. Out of those 128, 104 were asymptomatic. This could mean that true infection total could be five times higher than recorded.

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University of Nottingham child health professor and joint editor-in-chief, Alan Smyth, explained how this is a problem in determining the actual number of COVID-19 positive patients. "It is difficult to find a reliable estimate of the number of COVID positive patients who have no symptoms," he said. "As countries progress out of lockdown, a high proportion of infected, but asymptomatic, individuals may mean that a much higher percentage of the population than expected may have been infected with COVID."

The unnamed cruise ship left Argentina in mid-March with a 21-day itinerary cruise that involves the Antarctic. Their excursion however set sailed before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic due to the coronavirus.

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The passenger manifest included only individuals who, in the past three weeks, did not have any travel destinations to countries that had high coronavirus infection rates at the time. These countries were China, Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea or Iran.

Other preventive measures, such as the checking of temperature before embarkation, were also followed prior to the cruise. On the ship, hand washing stations were made available particularly in the dining area.

In spite of all these, one of the passengers developed a fever, which called for the ship captain to order a lockdown. They were not allowed to re-dock in Argentina after the country already closed its border. So, the ship went next to Uruguay where a number of people were brought to the hospital. It was there that the officials of the country mandated that everyone who was still on board had to be tested for the coronavirus.

These findings from the researchers will play a big deal for the shipping industry, particularly those that involve pleasure cruises. Ship cruises, like most businesses, have been in a standstill due to the pandemic.

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