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What the cruise-ship outbreaks reveal about COVID-19

Close confines help the virus to spread, but closed environments are also an ideal place to study how the new coronavirus behaves.
  1. Smriti Mallapaty
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When COVID-19 was detected among passengers on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, the vessel offered a rare opportunity to understand features of the new coronavirus that are hard to investigate in the wider population. Some of the first studies from the ship — where some 700 people were infected — have revealed how easily the virus spreads, provided estimates of the disease’s severity and allowed researchers to investigate the share of infections with no symptoms.

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Nature 580, 18 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00885-w

References

  1. Mizumoto, K., Kagaya, K., Zarebski, A. & Chowell, G. Euro Surveill. 25, 2000180 (2020).

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  2. Russell, T. W. et al. Preprint at medRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773 (2020).

  3. Mizumoto, K. & Chowell, G. Infect. Dis. Model. 5, 264–270 (2020).

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