The study found that 1,064 of the 1,568 sailors aboard, or about 68 percent, had tested positive for the virus.
But the carrier returned to port while the outbreak was still in progress, and the crew went into quarantine, so it was unclear whether the virus was finished infecting new sailors even after 68 percent had caught it.
Also, outbreaks aboard ships are poor models for those on land because infections move much faster in the close quarters of a vessel than in a free-roaming civilian population, said Dr. Natalie E. Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida.
More important, the early estimates from Wuhan and Italy were later revised upward, Dr. Lipsitch noted, once Chinese scientists realized they had undercounted the number of victims of the first wave. It took about two months to be certain that there were many asymptomatic people who had also spread the virus.
It also became clearer later that “superspreader events,” in which one person infects dozens or even hundreds of others, played a large role in spreading Covid-19. Such events, in “normal” populations — in which no one wears masks and everyone attends events like parties, basketball tournaments or Broadway shows — can push the reproduction number upward to 4, 5 or even 6, experts said. Consequently, those scenarios call for higher herd immunity; for example, at an R0 of 5, more than four out of five people, or 80 percent, must be immune to slow down the virus.
Further complicating matters, there is a growing consensus among scientists that the virus itself is becoming more transmissible. A variant “Italian strain” with the mutation known as D614G has spread much faster than the original Wuhan variant. A newly identified mutation, sometimes called N501Y, that may make the virus even more infectious has recently appeared in Britain, South Africa and elsewhere.
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