That's not evidence of airborne until they rule out ongoing transmission among and from the crew. Unless there's a pattern of cases in rooms with connected ventilation. It's frustrating not having important details. I would have thought local experts were on it, but not after hearing the crew complaints.
Yeah, Japan appears to have handled this with all the aplomb China showed at the start, and they at least had the excuse of it being new.
I hope all the people who criticised China give Japan the same treatment.
A couple of things are possible. Could be all the culturing is finding cases earlier than symptoms appear. And/or more asymptomatic and mild cases are going unnoticed and spreading the virus.
And we can't rule out false positives. There seems to be a number of problems with testing.
Yes to all the above, although I doubt the false positives are sufficient to account for the increasing numbers on the ship. One or two, sure - 300, not likely.
____________________________
Applying maths with a little more information now, I get the following:
60% of the population catch it (4.5bn), of which 70% are asymptomatic or very mild. That leaves 1.35 billion people who will know they've caught something, and going by data to date, 10-15% of those cases will be severe enough to require hospital treatment.*
That's between 130 and 200 million people, and 5% of them will die - 6-10 million. All of that is going to put strain on every sector of society, particularly the health sector, which will come close to breaking point, and will break in many places. Intensive care will be overwhelmed everywhere the virus gets to.
One of the antivirals being tested working is the best hope we have for avoiding that level of harm.
*The cruise ship percentage is a lot higher, but I'm presuming a much higher median age than ordinary populations, and older people are definitely the front line for trouble.
