Cruise ship quarantined in Hong Kong over coronavirus as 30 crew members test positive and city infection rate climbs

The most difficult thing to do in today’s highly mobile global travel society is to control the outbreak of a deadly virus.

That is especially the case when that virus has a lengthy incubation period during which most people show little-to-no signs or symptoms, making cases hard to spot until it’s too late.

That characterizes the current coronavirus outbreak: A bug that doesn’t show itself right away, takes some time to show up, and can actually re-infect people who have already had it.

So, that means the only way to prevent the virus from spreading more rapidly is to keep people who have it or have been exposed to it from coming into contact with unexposed people, especially those crammed into a densely populated urban center like Hong Kong.

As reported by Russia Today, Hong Kong health officials who are already dealing with a rising number of infected people and a city administrator, Carrie Lam, who was slow to seal the country’s borders, quarantined an entire cruise ship after 30 of its crew members tested positive for coronavirus.

The ship, which arrived from Taiwan, belongs to the World Dream cruise company and is carrying 1,800 people. As RT.com reports, currently everyone on board is being tested for the virus as it remains docked. 

The news site noted further that it isn’t clear when the ship’s passengers and crew will be cleared to disembark: 

Taiwan’s Maritime and Port Bureau said no one was allowed ashore, after the vessel alerted the authorities that three of its previous passengers had been diagnosed with coronavirus. The passengers in question took a separate five-day cruise from China to Vietnam in late January and were hospitalized after returning to the Chinese city of Nansha.

Globally, more than 25,000 people have been infected, but the vast majority of those are in China. For it’s part, according to figures published online by the South China Morning Post, only a handful of people in Taiwan have been infected.

‘Two sets of data’

The current strain of coronavirus was previously unknown. Chinese researchers and health officials believe it mutated to humans from an animal, perhaps bats, in Wuhan City, an urban center of about 11 million people near the central part of the country.

More than 500 people have died from the virus, officials said, with all but a couple having occurred on mainland China. One person has died in Hong Kong and another in the Philippines. In all, more than 911 patients have recovered, Russia Today reported.

Meanwhile, Natural News founder/editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, reported Wednesday that there are growing indications that China has not been truthful with the world regarding the number of infections and deaths.

Citing a report by Taiwan News, Adams suggested that Chinese government officials may be keeping ‘two sets of books’ on infections and deaths.

“Netizens also noticed that each time the screen with the large numbers appears, it shows a comparison with the previous day’s data which demonstrates a ‘reasonable’ incremental increase, much like comparisons of official numbers. This has led some netizens to speculate that Tencent has two sets of data, the real data and ‘processed’ data,” the Taiwan report said.

While published numbers claim some 25,000 infections and 500-plus deaths, Adams — using screen grabs of subsequently deleted data published online — wrote: 

…[O]bservers have noted that the official numbers reported by the communist Chinese government recently slipped into the “real numbers,” suddenly showing far higher confirmed infections and deaths: 154,024 infections and 24,589 deaths.  

While some may believe that the data entered was merely a typo, Adams noted further that above each number is an “increase” factor that calculates “how much larger” current numbers are “compared to” figures from the previous day. The figures calculate out to much larger numbers than what’s being ‘officially’ reported by Beijing, he wrote.

See his full report here.

Sources include:

NaturalNews.com

TaiwanNews.com

RT.com