There is the same observation to be made with the French Aircraft carrier task force. Close to 700 sailors tested positive and only 20 hospitalized. A parallel can be made with some of the cruise ships.
There really seems to be a strange asymptomatic transmission.
Shipyards will have some serious work in their hands to redesign ventilation and air filtration systems for all large crew/passenger ships.
Here is the key point:
Roughly 60 percent of the over 600 sailors who tested positive so far have not shown symptoms of COVID-19, the potentially lethal respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, the Navy says. The service did not speculate about how many might later develop symptoms or remain asymptomatic.
“With regard to COVID-19, we’re learning that stealth in the form of asymptomatic transmission is this adversary’s secret power,” said Rear Admiral Bruce Gillingham, surgeon general of the Navy.
The figure is higher than the 25% to 50% range offered on April 5 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force.
I don’t see the virtue of the headline hyping ‘a clue’ or ‘key’ that the coronavirus speedily transmits itself by means of asymptomatic carriers. This is stuff that has been known for over a month, and for which the Governor of Georgia got dragged for inaccurately claiming ‘we’ learned about a day ago a couple weeks ago:
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that learning that 60% of the sailors who tested positive were asymptomatic is a ‘clue’. The Reuters article does track back on itself a bit later by saying that this 60%:
"…is higher than the 25% to 50% range offered on April 5 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force. "
Oh, so, it was known, it’s just that the number that came about from a comprehensive 100% testing regime revealed a higher percentage than provided by a Dr using models of general exposures in society based on less than 100% testing who was not addressing shipboard living conditions? If you take a bunch of people and force them to live and work inside enclosed spaces you get higher transmission rates than those based on general societal exposures and incomplete testing models? This is not that groundbreaking to learn.
The article might be better focused on the ‘clue’ being a massive and complete testing scheme is the surest way to address dealing with the threat to affected populations and understand it’s transmission.
I’d suspect that the difference in part would be due to the fact that the population on the aircraft carrier skews younger then the general population.
EDIT: I see that’s included in the article;
Still, the case of the Theodore Roosevelt offers a case study for researchers about how the virus spreads asymptomatically in a confined environment among mostly younger adults.
That cohort has been somewhat underrepresented in the epidemiological data so far, said William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
“The findings are of enormous interest because the proportion of people who are asymptomatic is just simply not known,” Schaffner said, when asked about the Navy’s data.
Or that the testing method used was not 100% accurate.
(Large discrepancy has been reported in many cases)