TBH, the 70 cases that are not related to the cruise ship is what is more worrying.

According to recent study by Chinese CDC, there are 100 cases in China at the end of last year, and the outbreaks came like 3 weeks later.

Japan had this precious time window to tackle this issue RIGHT NOW, before it gets out of hand. But so far it doesn't seem to me that their government is taking this with the deserved severity.

[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1180059.shtml

Japan's cases are more diffuse and they have a test now. The population is also much more aware of the disease now. There are some drugs that show promises. These are the positives. Hopefully it is enough to make the spreading slower in Japan, though it seems they failed to learn much from China's experience. They are telling people with symptoms to stay home and wait for four days. Really they need to find and treat people from very early on. Home isolation does not work. And once patients covert to the serious stage it could quickly overload the medical system even if 80% recover without much treatment.

The problem with this approach is that many people who have the common cold or influenza A will end up going to a hospital and catching coronavirus there. Sometimes the best thing to do is avoid hospitals entirely and if you have to go to the hospital, do everything possible to avoid getting anyone else sick on the ride from your home to the hospital.

The big issue right now is the asymptomatic transmission where a caretaker can be very careful yet still catch the disease and spread it before they know they've been contaminated.

The hardest part is isolation in a way that protects caretakers.

It is a good thing they are telling people to call the hotlines instead of going to the hospital, but someone should do a follow-up to test people at home (on a triage or a random sampling basis). They can't just wait for things to burst open. The available drugs (Remdesivir is not widely available) are non-specific and likely only effective at the onset. Hopefully it is still early and most callers just have flu or cold.

In Japan, it works a bit differently. People who have a cold go to the local clinic. If the clinic is worried, then they send the patient to the hospital. It's also pretty normal to go to the clinic even if your symptoms aren't severe -- just for a cold. I suspect the "stay at home for 4 days" is meant to stop people from congregating at the clinic.

Ideally however you deliver a mask to them before they very outside their home so they don't infect taxi drivers, bus drivers, uber drivers and other passengers.

Only people driving to the clinic in their own car are less likely to infect their compatriots

I strongly suspect those cheap little surgical masks most people wear are close to useless, as they are incredibly porous and allow completely unfiltered air to get in through the sides of the mask.

A P100 or at least an N95 respirator would be far more effective, but most people aren't going to wear those, unfortunately.

They're meant to prevent already sick people from spreading particulate when they cough or sneeze.

A Japanese infection prevention specialist has a video report after visiting the ship[1]. (Direct video in English[2].) No separation of red and green zones. PPE on and PPE off indiscriminantly. No infection control specialist in charge. Massively botched.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/f5s6fq/infecti...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtHYZkLuKcI&feature=youtu.be

Hashimoto Gaku, Ministry of Health Vice Minister, has since objected to that account on Twitter[1] -- with a picture of what seems to be supposed to be a decontamination hall or a hall used as a hallway, with two parallel entry and exit marked as "decontaminated route" and "contaminated route", separated by barriers, guess what barriers, fucking queue barriers. Checkout line ropes. Classy ones, yeah. Coronavirus are respectable beings, you know. After questions as to whether this is a novel method of self-whistleblowing started to mound up, Vice Minister deleted the picture.

https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/2002/20/news123.html

This somehow resembles both Fukushima and Korean Sewol disaster 'recovery efforts', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_A8dq2fA5o. Social norms (face, status) above common sense.

> Also, you can't just quarantine for two weeks, you need to have a two week interval without any new infections. The two week counter should have been resetting every day that the "new infection count" wasn't zero.

Also 14 days might be too low an estimate, it might actually take up to 24 days for symptoms to appear: https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-symptoms-2...

I read the study that the 24 day timeline comes from - it's a rather uncertain worst case scenario. IIRC it comes from a single case report and it's more likely there's a gap in the transmission path that makes the incubation period look longer than it is.

A more recent study from Chinese researchers (so I don't know how much it can be trusted) studied 1099 infections and reported a more reassuring mean incubation period of 3 days.

Single biggest fck up in this whole thing. The PCR protocol should be pushed everywhere and test everyone that is symptomatic for any corona virus, meaning if you have a cold you should stay home until it passes.

I really hope they actually plan to quarantine everyone from the ship for two weeks, individually, and any talk about "passengers who tested negative are free to go home" is just a big misunderstanding.

Otherwise they're basically asking for the worst outcome. What are they even thinking.

Iwata Kentaro, an infectious disease specialist, released a video with his criticisms of the ships quarantine.

TL:DR bureaucracy is getting in the way of proper containment. There were no green/red containment areas. Personnel not wearing proper gear.

He believes that bureaucrats in charge of the quarantine are actively blocking disease specialist from helping.

> I hope somebody goes to jail for this.

For incompetence?

A public health / pandemic expert should know that "quarantining" 3000 people on a cruise ship only gets you from 10 cases to 3000 cases.

It's a leaky, filthy sieve with 3000 bodies and no isolated airflow.

For exercising authority (especially government authority) incompetently? Absolutely.

Negligent homicide is a thing.

Maliciousness is not an inherent element of a crime. For example, many people believe themselves perfectly safe drunk drivers when they drive home, but their incompetence combined with taking actions that put others at risk result in penalties.

If you do not punish incompetence when lives are on the line, then you should expect more deaths due to incompetence. We send people to prison for far less than this.

> If you do not punish incompetence when lives are on the line, then you should expect more deaths due to incompetence. We send people to prison for far less than this.

The difference here (vs drunk driving) is the situation that led to this particular kind of incompetence is unlikely to be repeated. The situation also involved significant unknowns and gaps in basic understanding of the danger.

IMHO, it would be wrong to put anyone in jail for the handling of the cruise ship quarantine. That would be unnecessarily punitive. Might as well just kill a literal scapegoat. This seems like more a situation for a fault-free retrospective aimed at improving procedures and training for future epidemics.

Cruise ships are notorious for norovirus transmission. They are not built for a quarantine. Whomever made the decision should be stripped of their credentials along with jail time, which is what the passengers had to go through as is, in order to make an example of what should happen to anyone in authority making such an ignorant, if not publicly malicious, decision in the future.

What would be a better alternative?

- Disembark everyone and send them home immediately for quarantine there.

- Disembark everyone and send them to hospitals for quarantine there.

- Disembark everyone and quarantine them in smaller groups off-ship.

Basically anything other than leaving 3000 people to simmer with the virus. Isolation on the ship is so bad that if they continued the quarantine as they are doing now for another few weeks, all 3000 would basically be guaranteed to catch it.

It is just a mini https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 it isn’t a quarantine, it is a plague ship.

Authorities didn’t know what to do, so letting everyone on the ship get infected was the second best option.

I would have setup make shift tents on a military base 25m apart and measured temp continuously and PCR once a day.

I think (hope) that's a hyperbolic comparison. Having decision paralysis, not knowing how to handle the situation and letting it get out of control, is a lot different from the depraved acts of Unit 731 where atrocities were being committed deliberately. To be properly analogous, the Japanese government would have to be deliberately making the situation on the ship worse. It's the difference between depraved maliciousness and incompetence.

Unit 731 is human experimentation, the ship is just gross political incompetence.