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How worried should I be about hantavirus?

5 questions about the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak, answered.

The details of the ongoing outbreak of hantavirus may sound uncomfortably familiar to all of us who lived through Covid-19: an aggressive pneumonia-like infection, a cruise ship quarantined with sick passengers, the world’s public health authorities on high alert.

So it’s natural to have the follow-up question: Is this the next pandemic?

Not likely, experts say, for one major reason: Hantavirus is not equipped for rapid transmission in the same way that the novel coronavirus was. “Just because something is a public health emergency doesn’t mean it’s a pandemic,” Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. Bill Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, said while it’s vital to stamp out the outbreak, his concerns about a large-scale emergency are “essentially nil.”

But this is still a big deal. Three people have died so far. Five others have gotten sick. Nearly 150 people are trapped on a cruise ship that has been rerouted to the Canary Islands for medical assistance. And if nothing else, the hantavirus poses a test for public health’s ability to quash an outbreak before it gets out of hand.

Here’s what you need to know.

What happened on the cruise ship?

Here is the timeline of events aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius, which departed from Argentina on April 1 with plans to travel to islands across the Atlantic Ocean as even as far as mainland Antarctica, according to the World Health Organization:

A Dutch man who had traveled in South America prior to boarding became sick with fever, headache, and diarrhea on April 6, deteriorating until he died on April 11.

A woman who was in close contact with the man went ashore on the Atlantic island of Saint Helena on April 24 with gastrointestinal symptoms. She flew to South Africa, where she died on April 26 after arriving in Johannesburg. Posthumous tests on May 4 confirmed she had hantavirus.

Another man began showing signs of respiratory distress on........

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