May 27, 2020

expert reaction to study testing all cruise passengers and crew for COVID-19

A report, published in Thorax, has looked at the spread of COVID-19 amongst the passengers and crew of a cruise ship.

Dr Andrew Freedman, Reader in Infectious Diseases and Honorary Consultant Physician, University of Cardiff, said:

“This report confirms how readily COVID-19 infection seems to spread on board cruise ships with over half the passengers and crew PCR positive on swab testing. Perhaps of greater interest is the finding that 81% of these positive individuals were asymptomatic.  We cannot be 100% certain that the high proportion of positive swab tests represents true infection rather than being due to environmental contamination on board the ship.

“However, if this finding was replicated in other settings including the UK as a whole, it would suggest a much higher proportion of the population might already have had the infection than is currently estimated.  We need to await the more widespread rollout of antibody testing to determine whether this is indeed the case. 

“We do not yet know whether previous infection and the presence of antibodies confers long lasting immunity.  However, a higher proportion of the population at low risk of reinfection in the short term would reduce the chance of a second wave of COVID-19 after easing of lockdown measures.”

* COVID-19: in the footsteps of Ernest Shackleton by Alvin Ing et al. was published in Thorax on Wednesday 27 May.

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

Dr Andrew Freedman: No conflict of interest.