How Well is Hantavirus Being Handled?

On May 10, an American passenger on a cruise ship tested positive for the Andes strain of Hantavirus. The outbreak on the ship has led to three deaths, but health officials say the risk to Americans is low.

Hantavirus is typically passed through contact with infected rodents. The Andes strain is the only one transmissible between infected humans through prolonged contact. According to health officials it does not spread as easily as COVID-19 or influenza. Still, cruise ship outbreaks can be hard to contain with close quarters and passengers and crew from 28 different countries and only five years past a global pandemic, the outbreak has sparked global concern about public health preparedness.

Opinions about the outbreak varied across the political spectrum. Some on the left thought it’s being handled well, others argued Americans should be more worried considering President Trump’s cuts to the CDC and his withdraw from the World Health Organization. On the right, some thought the left would blame any deaths on Trump and posited that the travel agencies should be more prepared for cases like this.

TownHall (Right) featured a piece arguing, “This mad scramble was preventable. There's a lot of handwringing over the fact that we don't have a vaccine or medication to control Andes hantavirus. That's not the real issue. It is not economically feasible to develop treatments for rarely seen viruses…The answer is to rigorously follow infection prevention principles. As we invade ecosystems that harbor thousands of untreatable viruses, the key is to isolate anyone showing symptoms of illness, identify the pathogen if possible, and curb the spread.”

“The ship's commanders blew it, not testing for the cause of the birdwatcher's death or considering that more passengers might have become infected. The travel industry has to get with it. If customers are being taken to remote places, cruise ships and other travel purveyors need to be aware of the risks and have infection control routines locked into place.”

A Guardian (Left) piece argued that the virus was being handled well. “Let me start by saying that this isn’t the Covid pandemic – only Covid was Covid. Previous hantavirus outbreaks have been contained (although none were on a cruise ship)…the UK Health Security Agency (headed by Prof Susan Hopkins) has been leading on this – and to its credit has taken a sensible, scientific and proactive response to managing the outbreak…Even if more cases arise, scientists are already looking for solutions: vaccine studies are being expedited, existing drugs that might work against hantavirus are being studied and diagnostics are being tested.”

Noah Rothman (Lean Right) said in the National Review (Right), “There isn’t a cable news producer on earth who could resist the temptations presented by the outbreak of a rare and deadly communicable disease…The foremost imperative is, of course, to inform the public of their relative risk, but the human-interest element is also irresistible. Filling news consumers’ heads with lurid images of a diseased ghost ship bound for ports unknown is the sort of thing that captures eyeballs in an age of short attention spans.”

“For the most part, the mainstream left-of-center press has elevated its duty to inform over its imperatives around audience retention…But there is a species of news consumer who has little interest in relative risk…there is no shortage of irresponsible communicators who are willing to trigger their readers’ fight-or-flight response by evaluating the outbreak through the prism of their contempt for the Trump administration.”

A New York Times Opinion (Left) writer said that we aren’t taking the risks seriously enough. “How are people who may have been exposed supposed to protect themselves if they are not told of the modes of transmission and the stakes accurately and loudly, including when the definitions evolve? Public health officials, from the W.H.O. to U.S. officials, would be more helpful if they stopped constantly reassuring people about the likelihood of future events they can’t accurately calculate — like the odds of a pandemic occurring or how long this outbreak could last — and just told us more details about the things that matter: mode of transmission, lengthy period of incubation and the inevitable uncertainty of something for which there is little actual knowledge.”