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The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is .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 Our predicted data also did not include possible transmission between crew and passengers prior to and during the quarantine period as they come into contact with each other, such as serving meals. We used the estimated incubation period from 186 patients in China, with known dates of both infection and onset of symptoms. The governing equation is known to be ill-posed, and assumptions were made (see Methods section, and also Li et al, 2005) , though our method successfully predicted all seven reported super spreading events in the 2003 SARS epidemics in Hong Kong and Singapore. Figure S1 also showed that we also successfully predicted in the infection date for the 186 patients. Lastly, our approach cannot be used to study the roles of the asymptomatic cases in the transmission. The asymptomatic cases were first detected on the ship when the tests were extended to all passengers on Feb 15 after focusing in those with symptoms (Wikipedia, 2020) . If the spatial distribution (room where the confirmed case stayed) of both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases is available, it may be possible to infer if any asymptomatic transmission occurred and how.