Modelling COVID-19 outbreak on the Diamond Princess ship using the public surveillance data

Shi Zhao; Peihua Cao; Daozhou Gao; Zian Zhuang; Weiming Wang; Jinjun Ran; Kai Wang; Lin Yang; Mohammad R Einollahi; Yijun Lou; Daihai He; Maggie H Wang

doi:10.1016/j.idm.2022.05.005

Modelling COVID-19 outbreak on the Diamond Princess ship using the public surveillance data

Infect Dis Model. 2022 Jun;7(2):189-195. doi: 10.1016/j.idm.2022.05.005. Epub 2022 May 26.

Authors

Shi Zhao^{1

2}, Peihua Cao³, Daozhou Gao⁴, Zian Zhuang⁵, Weiming Wang⁶, Jinjun Ran⁷, Kai Wang⁸, Lin Yang⁹, Mohammad R Einollahi¹⁰, Yijun Lou⁵, Daihai He⁵, Maggie H Wang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ JC School of Public Health and Primary Care, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
² Shenzhen Research Institute of Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China.
³ Clinical Research Centre, Zhujiang Hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.
⁴ Department of Mathematics, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China.
⁵ Department of Applied Mathematics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.
⁶ School of Mathematics and Statistics, Huaiyin Normal University, Huaian, China.
⁷ School of Public Health, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
⁸ Department of Medical Engineering and Technology, Xinjiang Medical University, Urumqi, China.
⁹ School of Nursing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.
¹⁰ School of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak on the Diamond Princess (DP) ship has caused over 634 cases as of February 20, 2020. We model the transmission process on DP ship as a stochastic branching process, and estimate the reproduction number at the innitial phase of 2.9 (95%CrI: 1.7-7.7). The epidemic doubling time is 3.4 days, and thus timely actions on COVID-19 control were crucial. We estimate the COVID-19 transmissibility reduced 34% after the quarantine program on the DP ship which was implemented on February 5. According to the model simulation, relocating the population at risk may sustainably decrease the epidemic size, postpone the timing of epidemic peak, and thus relieve the tensive demands in the healthcare. The lesson learnt on the ship should be considered in other similar settings.

Keywords: COVID-19; Diamond princess ship; Reproduction number; Transmission.