Transmission routes of Covid-19 virus in the Diamond Princess Cruise ship

Pengcheng Xu; Hua Qian; Te Miao; Hui-ling Yen; Hongwei Tan; Benjamin J. Cowling; Yuguo J Li

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is . https://doi. org/10.1101 org/10. /2020 The spatial distribution of the infected cabins can also reveal if the central air conditioning played role. Among the 1353 staterooms available on board, the cabin area ranges from 15-16 m 2 for 1137 "interior", "oceanview" and "balcony" rooms, 26 m 2 for 186 "mini suite" rooms, 31 m 2 for 29 suites or family suites, and one grand room of 58 m 2 . We do not have the data of distribution of the confirmed cases among these rooms. Sekizuka et al (2020) stated that "all COVID-19 patients were widely distributed in all 18 decks across the ship". The spatial distribution of the confirmed cases in another cruise ship outbreak involving a small number of the infected passengers might also serve as a reference (International Financial News and Beijing News, 2020) . The World Dream ship departed from Port of Nanshan, Guangzhou on 19 Jan 2020, visited Nha Trang and Da Nang in Vietnam on 19-24 Jan with 6903 passengers and crew on board, and among them, 108 were from Hubei in which 28 from Wuhan. The ship returned to the port of Nansha on 24 Jan. The distribution of the nine infected staterooms and the distribution of the 183 Hubei passengers on the ship were both random. Central airconditioning system is commonly designed in spatial zones, and each air handling unit serve one zone. We failed to identify any spatial infection clusters in the World Dream cruise ship outbreak.