Hacker News Reader

Comment by thebruce87m | Hacker News Reader

Are there any examples of Flu or anything else infecting a cruise ship in a short time period? That was the thing that stood out the most to me.

View on HN

Norovirus (aka food poisoning) can spread incredibly quickly and is the usual example of "fast moving virus in isolated population".

e.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/norovirus-outbreak-hits-royal-c...

Norovirus is the bane of my existence as a parent of 3 small children. One kid throwing up? Great. Expect everyone in the family to have it within three or four days.

A better example would be norovirus; once that's on a cruise ship, it gets ugly fast.

The tricky thing about my comparing with influenza is that "it's just the flu". Even if an influenza infection would spread with comparable ease on a cruise ship (and maybe it doesn't), I'm guessing it would not be investigated, reported or even remarked.

Not all flus are alike. Some, like H5N1 or Swine Flu were investigated and tracked in great detail, to the point of individual transmission chains.

H1N1 pandemic from 2009 has infected 1.4 billion people, with only a 0.02% mortality rate.

Based on those numbers alone we can be pretty sure that it would have infected everyone on a boat.

If this coronavirus will have the same spread, we could be talking of 19,600,000 to 42,000,000 deaths, or even more if the infections happen all at once and overwhelm the hospitals.

So let's hope it's not as contagious as H1N1 or we're fucked.

I guess it could be worse. We could be talking of the Spanish flu, which killed more than 1% of the world population.

AFAIK cruise ships are notorious for spreading infections diseases between the thousands relatively tightly packed on board for weeks at a time. Though usually these are digestion related diseases and usually less severe.

With flu probably about 50% of passengers have been vaccinated. Another 30% or so may already have some level of immunity. With covid nobody (or relatively few people who have had it by now) has immunity and there is no vaccine.

We do have numerous examples of noroviruses infecting a lot of people on cruise ships.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com