in positive Hantavirus Update Sunday, authorities said passengers and crew disembarked from plane Hondius Cruise ships are being evacuated back to their home countries after encountering a deadly outbreak. They will be quarantined there to prevent further spread of the disease, according to state regulations. Passengers will be tested upon arrival and then taken to a local hospital or quarantine facility, or sent home to quarantine. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended that all passengers on board the ship be quarantined for 42 days from Sunday.
However, the CDC and WHO have been forced to address concerns about another coronavirus-like pandemic. Jay Bhattacharya, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control, explained in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper why the outbreak at MV Hondius shouldn’t worry locals.
Why hantaviruses won’t become a coronavirus-like pandemic
“This is not COVID, Jack, and we don’t want to treat it like COVID,” Bhattacharya told Tapper on Sunday. The 17 American passengers are expected to return to U.S. soil in the coming days after disembarking from the MV Hondius in Tenerife.
Authorities said the Americans will be sent to the Nebraska State Quarantine Facility for medical evaluation and monitoring. Officials stressed that the operation is being conducted under strict containment protocols and no public interaction is expected during the transfer.
There were 147 passengers on board.
Bhattacharya repeatedly stressed that the current outbreak was not similar to the early stages of COVID-19 and said existing hantavirus containment procedures had proven effective in past incidents.
“We don’t want to cause public panic. We want to treat it with hantavirus protocols, and we have successfully controlled outbreaks in the past. So we follow those protocols,” he noted.
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“This health alert is being issued because these 17 individuals arrived in the United States very quickly. So we just want to make sure the medical community is aware of this.”
“The key message I want to convey to our viewers is that this is not COVID-19. This is not causing [that] Some kind of explosion. “
Officials explain why transmission risk remains low
Bhattacharya said hantaviruses remain difficult to spread from person to person, especially when infected people are asymptomatic.
“Risk in this case does not mean risk of death…if they have been in close contact with someone who has symptoms, then the risk is high risk,” he explained.
“If they have not been in close contact with someone who has symptoms, then we will consider them to be low risk. If they have been in close contact, we will consider them to be medium risk or high risk.”
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The acting CDC director also noted that seven Americans who returned home from the ship weeks ago were not showing symptoms and therefore did not pose a transmission threat.
“If they are asymptomatic, they are not at risk of infecting others,” he said.
“This is not coronavirus”
The virus is usually spread by rodents, but can also spread from person to person in rare cases of close contact. Health officials in Johannesburg first identified the virus on May 2 while treating a British man who fell ill and was admitted to intensive care, 21 days after another passenger died.
World Health Organization officials said on Sunday that the man’s health had improved.
The World Health Organization said the first passenger to die on the ship may have been infected before boarding the ship, possibly while traveling in Argentina and Chile.
According to the World Health Organization on Friday, eight people have become ill on the ship, six of whom have been confirmed to have the virus. Three people died – a Dutch couple and a German national.
Four of them remain hospitalized in South Africa, the Netherlands and Switzerland. A team of medical experts airborne by the British military are treating a suspected case on the remote island of Tristan da Cunha, a British overseas territory.
(With information from Reuters)
