How many COVID-19 PCR positive individuals do we expect to see on the Diamond Princess cruise ship?

  1. Jing Qin
  2. Fang Chen
  3. Huijuan Ma
  4. Yukun Liu
  5. Dean Follmann
  6. Yong Zhou

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Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global epidemic crisis with tens of thousands confirmed cases surfacing everyday. The infection rates in households, offices and public places are quite different from those in encompassed spaces such as airplanes, trains and cruise ships.

Studying the behavior of COVID-19 in confined spaces like Diamond Princess cruise is of great importance to understand the disease progression and to manage the epidemic. We propose a novel mixture model to estimate the infection distribution and total infected number after 14 days of quarantine based on PCR test data performed on the Diamond Princess cruise.

Results

In contrast to the officially reported 634 individuals with PCR-positive results after the 14 day quarantine, which as of April 27, 2020 had increased to 712, we conclude that this number should be at least 1000. The discrepancy might be caused by the false-negative result of the PCR test or the occurrence of infection after the test.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.14.20230938: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.11.14.20230938v1 on medRxiv