The Analysis of COVID-19 Transmission on Diamond Princess Cruise Ship

Xi, Z.; Meng, D.; Zhao, J.

This paper takes the COVID-19 transmission on the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship as an example to study the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in a relatively closed environment, and to evaluate control measures that can greatly reduce the transmission of COVID-19. The Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) method is used to simulate the transmission process, and the Latin Hypercube Sampling is applied for parameter estimation in ABM. The simulation results show that most of the infected cases on the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship were transmitted between passengers. However, at the beginning of the quarantine, most infected passengers were infected by crew members rather than other passengers. Due to the nature of their work, the crew members played a key role in the early spread of the epidemic on the cruise ship. If the lab testing was strengthened for crew members at the beginning of the quarantine, and the infected crew members were disembarked on time, the final total number of infected would be greatly reduced. Furthermore, if this measure is supplemented with other measures such as increasing the frequency of washing hand by crew members, strengthening hygiene for the process of distributing foods, strengthening deck surface cleaning which can reduce the probabilities of transmission from a crew member to a passenger and between passengers while on deck, the final number of infected would be further highly reduced. © 2021 IEEE.