Cruise ships and coronavirus — what did "we" expect to happen?

19 February 2020

With partial regard to what I wrote yesterday (about Wuhan coronavirus)

Infectious disease control is not for amateurs and inadequate physical plant.

In illustration

Let's consider the following YouTube video from Professor Kentaro Iwata, a Japanese infectious disease control specialist.

He managed to get himself invited aboard the Japan-quarantined cruise ship, Diamond Princess:

Subliminal Messages TV, Kentaro Iwata Explains Diamond Princess Cruise Experience, YouTube (18 February 2020)

The beginning of Iwata's video demonstrates that somebody was attempting to prevent Dr. Iwata's visit to the ship, at least in his infectious disease specialist capacity.

Given what he found after getting on board, one can hypothesize reasons why.

If you read faster than you listen — BBC News summarized Dr. Iwata's video

BBC wrote that:

Kentaro Iwata, professor at the infectious diseases division of Japan's Kobe University, described the situation on board as "completely inadequate in terms of infection control".

After visiting the ship, Prof Iwata posted a video to YouTube stating that the quarantine measures he witnessed failed to separate the infected from the healthy.

He reported:

Passengers and crew members moving freely between the green zone, which is supposedly infection-free, and the virus-hit red zone

People eating together and sharing living quarters

A failure to wear protective clothing, including among medical staff

No professional infection control specialist on board

[He said that] he was more afraid of catching the virus on board than he had been working in the field in Africa during the Ebola epidemic and in China during the Sars . . . outbreak.

Iwata's presentation is scarier than the BBC's underemphasized summary of it

This is especially true with regard to his account of being "so scared" of getting COVID-19.

He emphasized that, aboard the Diamond Princess — here quoted:

There was no way to tell where the virus is.

Everybody was not careful about it.

There was no single professional infection control person inside the ship.

There was nobody in charge of infection prevention.

The bureaucrats were in charge of everything.

This report does not make Japanese authorities look good

Japan's sloppy, bureaucratic approach to Diamond Princess replicates its too-cavalier Fukushima reactors design process, site selection, permitting and ultimate nuclear disaster of 2010.

The moral? — Why anyone goes on cruises, beats me

Do you really want to be trapped — for days or weeks — inside a figurative elevator filled with disease-carrying fellow mammal-monkeys?

Aircraft are bad enough.

PeteFree.com

Cruise ships and coronavirus — what did "we" expect to happen?