A Study of the Transmission Dynamics of COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship

ABSTRACT

The transmission of COVID-19 in relatively closed places such as ships, prisons, hospitals, is still a public concern. We take the transmission situation on the Diamond Princess Cruise ship as an example to study the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in a relatively closed place. The Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) method is applied to simulate the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. The Latin Hypercube sampling is proposed for parameter estimation in ABM. The simulation results show that most of the infected cases on the Diamond Princess Cruise ship were transmitted between passengers. However, at the beginning of the quarantine, the number of passengers infected by crew was much more than the number of passengers infected by other passengers. Based on this results, several control measures are designed. If at the beginning of the quarantine, the lab testing was strengthened for crew members, and the infected crew were disembarked in time, the final number of infected would be greatly reduced. Furthermore, if this measure was supplemented with the conventional control measures, the final number of infected would be further reduced. © 2022, The Editorial Department of Complex Systems and Complexity Science. All right reserved.