Health officials say no confirmed U.S. cases exist, but 41 people are now being monitored.
The number of people being monitored in the United States for hantavirus jumped sharply Today after federal health officials disclosed 16 additional individuals who had not previously been part of the public count. None of them were on the cruise ship at the center of the outbreak, but each had shared a flight with a passenger confirmed to have been infected.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the total of those now under monitoring across the country stands at 41, a figure that surfaced during a media briefing led by Dr. David Fitter, the agency’s incident manager for the hantavirus response. Fitter was direct about the current status. There are no confirmed hantavirus cases in the United States, he said, though testing is continuing for at least one individual whose initial results were described as inconclusive.
How the exposure spread beyond the ship
The 16 newly identified individuals were passengers on an April 25 flight from St. Helena, a remote island in the South Atlantic, to Johannesburg. They had been seated near a 69-year-old Dutch woman who had disembarked from the MV Hondius on April 24. Her husband had died on April 11, the first confirmed death linked to the outbreak. She collapsed shortly after landing in Johannesburg on April 26 and died the same day. She was confirmed to have had hantavirus on May 4.
The MV Hondius is a luxury expedition vessel. Hantavirus cases linked to the ship have now reached 11 total, according to the World Health Organization, with eight confirmed through laboratory testing and three deaths recorded, including the Dutch couple and a German national.
The 18 cruise passengers who were flown back to the United States earlier this week arrived Monday and are quarantining at facilities in Omaha, Nebraska, and Atlanta. The University of Nebraska Medical Center, which is housing 16 of those passengers, said Wednesday that one person who had been placed in a biocontainment unit had been medically cleared to move into a standard quarantine setting with the others. The CDC declined to provide further detail about that individual’s test results, saying it did not want to get ahead of the states before any formal announcement.
Seven other passengers had left the ship on April 24, returned to the United States on commercial flights before the outbreak was publicly identified, and are now being monitored at home by state health departments.
What monitoring actually means
For most of the 41 people under watch, monitoring is not a formal quarantine. The CDC is advising them to stay home and avoid contact with others for 42 days, the length of the virus’s maximum incubation window. Compliance is voluntary. Fitter said the agency is in contact with all Americans who may have been exposed, whether they are inside the country or still abroad.
The Andes strain of hantavirus at the center of this outbreak is primarily spread through contact with infected rodents, though it can be transmitted between people in rare instances. Public health experts have noted that this characteristic, unlike the airborne transmission that made COVID spread so rapidly, significantly limits the outbreak’s potential reach.
The WHO stated Tuesday that more cases are expected as the incubation period runs its course, but stressed the outbreak bears no resemblance to the early days of COVID and poses no pandemic-level threat.
A response under a microscope
The CDC has deployed more than 100 staff members to the outbreak response, a number disclosed Wednesday after early criticism that the agency had been slow to act. Some public health experts have pointed to recent staffing reductions at the agency and the United States’ withdrawal from the WHO as factors that have complicated coordination and slowed information sharing.
The agency has more than 100 staff members working on the outbreak, and officials say the situation is being monitored continuously. Whether additional exposures surface in the coming weeks will depend partly on how thoroughly flight and ship contacts have been traced, and whether anyone who was exposed has yet to come forward or been identified.