Given that there are probably very few places that are worse for a disease outbreak than a cruise ship where everyone eats and drinks all day and touches everything and uses the same toilets I'll actually take the 20% as an encouraging number.

Yeah, but as soon as they were aware of a single case on board, everyone single person on the ship was informed, told to stay in their room, and became paranoid about further transmission. I don't know if we'll have similar levels of obedience in the rest of the world.

There were reports that the actual procedures on the ship were extremely poor, and the quarantine was half-baked at best.

This isn't an accurate representation of how the number got to 700. The numbers were low when the ship docked. I recall in the single digits. Everyone was put on cabin quarantine, though people could leave their rooms for a window of time each day. It was quarantine and they were testing symptomatic people. I was watching mostly HK and Taiwanese news sources on it multiple times every day.

That makes me very skeptical of the WHO claim that asymptomatic spread isn't a problem.

They all got served food by the ship's crew, who still shared bunk beds and weren't really quarantined.

This is true. Do you think under those conditions, the ship would have symptomatic employees serving food or sharing bunks with asymptomatic employees? That really goes against the idea of quarantine, so I'd like to see evidence of that instead of assuming it.

I've heard it said that you have an almost 50% of catching something if you go on a cruise.

(AnimalMuppet surreptitiously crosses "take a cruise" off of his bucket list...)

Instead, just append it to the end of the list.

Cruises are pretty bad in terms of carbon footprint. We should all avoid them for more than one reason.

I feel like the Diamond Princess is an atypical case and it's maybe a mistake to extrapolate too much from it.

Isn’t a cruise ship a special case because it’s all self contained and there is almost no way to avoid contact with other infected people?

Unless they had access to disposable Kevlar jumpsuits, masks, gloves and disinfectant, they’d be hard pressed to slow its spread in cramped conditions.

The way ship HVAC systems are designed, it helps limit costs while simultaneously increasing infections from anything that's airborne.

In regard to Diamond Princess though, there were no safety protocols that were followed, so we don't know if it was the ship or the failure to follow pathogen related protocols.

This virus isn't airborne. It's spread through respiratory droplets.

There have been reports that aerosol spread can occur in limited cases:

https://youtu.be/xWj9OUAfTLQ

As this and all other reports indicate, it can become aerosolized in certain invasive hospital procedures, which involve sticking stuff into people's lungs. This holds for a lot of diseases, we've known that for decades, and it doesn't have anything to do with how spread occurs in public.

IIRC, the crew was largely responsible for spreading the virus.

Not that I'm faulting them. They simply were neither trained nor equipped to do a specialized job that was essentially forced on them - operating a quarantine facility.

The case fatality rate is in the tens of times higher for the novel coronavirus, when compared with common seasonal influenza.

What, where is the source for that? I've read "2x" and "3x" but never "tens of times".

The current figure provided by the WHO is 3.4%, typical figures for seasonal influenza being about 0.1.

3.4 / 0.1 = 34.

Using the infection rate on a cruise ship (pretty close to a perfect petri dish) is not at all representative.

Yeah -- as a result of them all being quarantined on the ship together for nearly a month.