A reader who’s just completed a PhD in biology has got in touch to point out just how prescient the data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship was. Why was that data ignored by public health panjandrums?
I thought to bring your attention to a paper published in MedRxiv by Russell et al from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on the 9th March 2020. They were looking at data from the Diamond Princess to try and establish case fatality rates. They got it wrong, but they did give the original data they used.
3,711 passengers and crew were on the Diamond Princess. Median age 58.
The virus had circulated undetected for 2 weeks, so given that masked-up health officials had caught COVID on board (The Maritime Executive 12.2.2020), it’s probably safe to assume everyone on the ship (or possibly only almost everyone) had been exposed.
Everyone on board had a PCR test (eventually)
619 out of 3,711 tested positive (17%)
Of which:
Symptomatic: 301
Asymptomatic: 318Observed deaths:
(70 – 79 age bracket): 6
(80 – 89 age bracket: 1So, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that 83% of passengers and crew may have had prior immunity.
Of positive tests, half were asymptomatic.
Of those who tested positive, ~1% died. No one died under the age of 70.
In the light of all the data collected in the last year as this pandemic has ranged across the world, it’s startling to think that the broad outline of what we could expect was already known, just no-one wanted to see.
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This was one of the first indications that a lot of what followed had nothing much to do with a virus. There were quite a few epidemiologists and virologists who shouted loud at the time, ‘look at this, what the hell are you doing’. All ignored, in retrospect quite a few no longer visible, obviously pressured to keep quiet.
All sorts of excuses were made about why it wasn’t useful to use the stats, stories about people locked in cabins so the virus didn’t circulate etc, all a crock of smelly stuff.
Great article The facts were evident last Spring, surely by now its clear this government didn’t want the real facts, they had an Agenda in mind, how bring in vaccine passports by the back door. Despite government denials, here they are. When is this government going to be held to account?
Yes. I have come to the only conclusion that I can see that makes sense. It wouldn’t have mattered how much first-class evidence had been available that this disease was not going to devastate the population because the Government had an agenda and saw that Covid was the ideal opportunity to use to fast-track this agenda. It doesn’t matter what we say, how many petitions we sign, how many marches, how much logic we use, they are not going to be swayed. We can see how the vaccine agenda is going to be pushed and pushed with more and more coercion and bullying because this is the real means to getting their vaccine passports and digital IDs – their ultimate goal.
There was some justification for panic in March last year. By April it was all over and you could see that from the Diamond Princess anyway. Good article Toby. The lockdown skeptic case has been vindicated – a lot of people just haven’t seen it yet.
Let’s revise that, Steve. Panic was never justified – but there was reason for reasonable, judicious caution in March 2020.
Yes – close attention to the Worldometers figures showed very quickly that the ”mild” cases grew rapidly to 99 per cent. All that was known about the Diamond Princess was obviously going to be very important. As you say – panic wasn’t justified, but it HAD to be instilled to achieve the end result, which is where we are now. Almost.
“619 out of 3,711 tested positive (17%)”
Interesting that the 17% figure is the same as that for intra-household infections that one study came up with. Coincidence is likely – but the ballpark suggests the area of actual transmissibility for this ‘deadly’ virus.
Well spotted.
The Diamond Princess showed how deadly the virus wasn’t.
The only not pick was that there were 14 deaths eventually. I don’t know the age breakdown.
Full age at death information has not been published, but the best estimate is that one person was in their 60s, 8 in their 70s and 5 in their 80s. The estimated age breakdown of those testing positive (some of whom did not have their age recorded) is 204 in their 60s, 269 in their 70s and 60 in their 80s.
This indicates infection fatality ratio (IFR) best estimates of 0.5%, 3.0% and 8.3% for people in their 60s, 70s and 80s respectively. The data are uninformative about IFRs at ages < 60.
You’re the Nic Lewis of the Judith Curry site? Thanks for your posts.
See also USS Franklin D Roosevelt stats. However, the interpretation as “prior immunity” is clearly incorrect, as is explaining the fact that very few young children and infants catch Covid as being due to “prior immunity” . If infants have immunity to a bug it is because they have been infected and if that were the case they would also infect their parents. If adults lack immunity it indicates that their children have not been infected either. The reason that young kids and half the population are unsusceptible to Covid is most likely due to differential expression of the ACE2 receptor to which the virus must bind in order to infect. There are a number of well established examples in other genes, of differential expression at different times in life which can be due to (a) more than one gene; ((b) differential processing of RNA or protein. This might be for the ACE2 receptor protein, or some other protein involved in the attachment and transport of the viral particle into the cell. The puzzling numbers for susceptibility can be explained if the ACE2 receptors or proteins involved in the internalisation process are polymorphic, i.e. there is more than one slightly… Read more »
Agree. The innate immunity is never discussed in Ferguson’s model.Take this article as an example This article show that some genetic variants seem to have protection against C-19 infection and outcome. There are even studies that blood group 0 might be protective against the virus. All these models calculating 80 % susceptibility for infection is based on that we are all equal to be infected with C-19. The models don’t factor in that there are unknown genetic factors etc which makes a subset of the population resistant to infection. Why have South East Asians so low infection rate? Why have indigenous population in Peru,Brazil so high infection rate? Better take all computer modelling with a grain of salt, not everything can be factored in.Computers will never solve the mystery of pandemics. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.04.21252931v1 A common TMPRSS2 variant protects against severe COVID-19 “ In a large population of SARS-CoV-2 positive patients, we show that this variant is associated with a reduced likelihood of developing severe COVID19 (OR 0.87, 95%CI:0.79-0.97, p=0.01). This association was stronger in homozygous individuals when compared to the general population (OR 0.65, 95%CI:0.50-0.84, p=1.3×10−3). We demonstrate in vitro that this variant, which causes the amino acid substitution valine to methionine, impacts… Read more »
It is all fascinating.
However, it’s as Hilarynw above says: ”It doesn’t matter what we say, how many petitions we sign, how many marches, how much logic we use, they are not going to be swayed….”
Thanks, Hilary. Sad but true.
“No-one wanted to see.”
I did, and I saw it.
I told everyone I knew.
Over 95% of the people I told called me callous, uncaring, selfish and a conspiracy theorist…
Ah well.
Eppur si muove
Facilis descensus averno…
Me too
Indeed the DP was almost a perfect situation. You couldn’t imagine a better experiment to try and understand the Covid-19 virun than unleashing it on a cruise ship populated by predominantly 60-80 year olds and seeing what would happen.
Lots of analyses were done. See links below for a couple of articles I wrote LAST April. But there was no interest ….what do I know ?
https://hectordrummond.com/2020/04/23/guest-post-what-we-think-we-know-and-what-it-might-mean-for-predictions-and-possible-mitigation-strategies/
https://hectordrummond.com/2020/04/30/guest-post-john-church-update-on-diamond-princess-lombardy-model-for-predicting-mortality-and-infection-spread/
And quite a few young people too – who didn’t suffer at all, I believe.
If only this could be seen, discussed and presented on MSM it might make some difference to peoples mindsets. Possibly,maybe, perhaps?
OK, OK, I know it aint going to happen but one can live in hope??
(7/3711) x 67,900,000. = 128,078
That’s very close to this figure 126,573 given on :-
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths
Awkward question: what about the quarantine that was imposed on the ship? Did that come too late (after the two-week free circulation?) to have an effect?
I remember (I think) reading at the time that a Japanese doctor (I think) said the quarantine was not imposed strictly enough to be effective.
I’m not trying to undermine the thesis of this article – just to understand fully what is going on.
No article on infection rates aboard the DP is complete without discussing the quarantine.
Genuine question.
Also the usual question…. were those deaths “from” or “with”?
Few, if anyone, who have examined the DP case in detail – including Nic Lewis above – believe that the on-board quarantine had much effect on transmission. It was too late. Many of those exposed were crew living in shared accommodation. Ventilation systems couldn’t isolated. Cabin food service meant that crew came into contact with passengers. What was even more interesting was that among people sharing small cabins the majority did not get infected when cabin companions tested positive. The final number reported to have tested positive was larger than 619 – I think that it may have been 745. We don’t know the number of false negatives as PCR testing was in a very early stage at that point. Nonetheless, it is hard to conclude that more than 25% (as a round number) of the exposed population were infected. One final factor was that a large portion of the crew were from the Philippines or other Asia countries. The low infection rate may reflect greater immunity among particular ethnic or national populations due to vaccination policies or exposure to other diseases. We don’t really know what is going on but the usual modelling assumptions of uniform susceptibility and no… Read more »
Many thanks for this. It makes things much clearer. Of course, Sceptics like to cite the DP example, and I want to as well, but I want to be clear what was going on – your post has explained a lot.
Despite being a Sceptic, I dam uneasy when the DP case is cited without discussing the quarantine measures and their effectiveness – that’s the sort of thing Lockdown Zealots do, and I don’t want to follow their example.
You are right, often we see DP data cited rathers shallowly… Gordon Hughes summary of the huge “gaps” in quarantine inside DP also illustrate the farce that are lockdown measures: they simply do not address what they state they are meant do achieve. Paraphrasing a former Brithish PM, “Lockdown means lockdown!”; but actually it never meant: people working in most activities never were isolated; even those few professionals who could isolate themselves were not strictly isolated, for instance, they could go to the supermarket or walk their dogs. Even before the absurd mandatory use of face masks, a careful analysis of each one of the “measures” could spot the huge gaps in it that could enable the free circulation of the virus; not to mention stupid, cosmetic and PR restrictions, for exemple of the opening of certain kind of shops that do not compare, in daily number of customers, to supermarkets, for instance. Supermarkets, with reduction of number of customers present: do they wear compressed air bottles? If not, what about the air-conditioning mixing of the air? Have plexiglass cages, open on top and on some of their sides, any effect on air mixing, or are they a ritual “you… Read more »
”Lockdown” has always seemed to be a slick word for ”banning anything that gives people pleasure”.
Indeed, our ‘lockdown’ was only ever the focused protection of the middle classes and well off.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if people actually on that ship were to be tested NOW, and the results analysed? Would the oldest ‘survivors’ have antibodies? Have they been covid-free ever since? Or infected but not ill? And so on.
Maybe they have been, and I’ve missed it. This cruise ship has always interested me – I was on a cruise at the same time. I often wonder how the passengers on that one, and others like it in February, living cheek by jowl, fared. I daresay they didn’t all die in the streets, or we’d have heard!
Yes, but that would be science, and we don’t do that anymore …
I look forward to Nuremburg Trials II. Information like this will be crucial in the prosecution of those who have wreaked havoc on society and the psychological damage they have caused.
Dr.John Ioannidis, Stanford, provided the world with this info early on. His information was ridiculed, smeared and suppressed. He is one of our heroes who has worked so hard to bring clear and honest data to the table. Thank god there continues to be scientific experts with integrity.
As I pointed out to my wife, Worldometer has an entry for the Diamond Princess the same as each country. The facts have been known from the start, but ignored, just as with the data about facemasks.
I followed the Diamond Princess saga in mid to late February 2020 and always mention it whenever anyone says “but it’s a novel virus and we’re all susceptible”. Ferguson should’ve used the example rather than his own dreadful guesswork.
There was also a good example on a US aircraft carrier but no actual figures that I can find.
Wasn’t there a submarine too?
Check out “An Outbreak of Covid-19 on an Aircraft Carrier” by Kasper et al. published in the New England Journal of Medicine. (https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa2019375?articleTools=true).
I regularly read articles claiming that people were justified for their fear and for accepting lockdowns because we did not know anything about this virus back in March 2020. The claim is false, as this article proves. By mid March of 2020 the world had all the hard empirical data it needed. I also studied the events of this ship back in March of 2020. I chose it for the obvious and critical reason that it was a completed event that could be studied in detail. I used the published age demographics of passenger and crew, the infection rates, and mortality figures to determine the severity of Covid. I noted that the ship ventilation was not sufficient to filter out a coronavirus. I read that the crew continued to work even when sick. From these facts I estimated that 20% of people might contract covid, and the IFR was a maximum of 0.2%. I then applied my findings to my country of Canada, and determined that at worst 30k would die – only 3 times worse than a mild flu season. I looked at the number of hospital beds in Canada and determined that though hospitals would be strained to… Read more »