Did we learn nothing from Covid?

[PistachioTiramisu]

I cannot believe that the people who were on board the cruise ship and who have contracted/been exposed to the hantavirus are all being repatriated! Why on earth were they not all kept on the ship until medical personnel were sure they were not infected? I don't care if they wanted to get home to their families - they are a potential danger. So now we have people in France, the UK and I think Japan who have travelled with other people back to their own country. It's madness.,

And they are not required to quarantine, either. It's not a legal requirement, they have only been "asked" to quarantine.

Covid and Andes strain are both airborne. Covid is MUCH more contagious, but hantavirus is more deadly.
The connection is that public health systems have totally failed to learn any lessons from covid. WHO have prevaricated over whether this strain of hanta is airborne, they have finally decided yes, but they have not gone for the full precautionary principle which it merits. If in doubt, go full precautionary. Keep people on the ship, evacuate only those needing treatment. N95/FFP2 required by anyone treating them/coming in contact.

The exact opposite is happening in the UK.

72 hours isolation, then assessment (given the incubation time is up to 8 weeks, an assessment at 72 hours says little) and then sent home to voluntarily quarantine or not.

I saw a doctor on TV trying to reassure people and they said something like it's not easily transmittable, you're not going to catch it on the bus or walking through a train station. You'd have to share a bed or sit next to someone on a plane for 8 hours 😬

Most of what little we know about how the Andes hantavirus spreads comes from the 2018-2019 outbreak, and it's not madly reassuring:

“There is very limited experience handling this virus,” said Palacios, who was the director of the Center for Genome Sciences at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases when he helped piece together how the virus moved from person to person. The study of the outbreak was published in 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine. ...

But the study also found that the virus could be passed relatively easily during this window, after periods of only brief proximity to someone else.

The researchers were able to show that the first patient, a 68-year-old man who attended a birthday party with about 100 other people, infected someone else after being in contact with them for only a few moments, on the way to the restroom."

What doctors know about how the Andes hantavirus spreads | CNN

They are wrong though - see the post below yours, someone caught it just from saying hello to the infected person in the corridor.
'Close contact' is not a mode of transmission. Airborne is the route of transmission - you can inhale it.
Dr Zoe on TV said children in schools won't catch it because they are not in close contact - utterly mental! Has she never been in a classroom? They are cesspits of infection with terrible ventilation.

BMJ has a piece saying we need to be taking utmost airborne measures: Hantavirus outbreak should reset WHO’s default approach to airborne risk | The BMJ

I'm not entirely convinced that the agencies managing the repatriations etc are as on top of things as they should be:

http://archive.today/yGm5q

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/08/british-chef-exposed-rat-virus-risk-flight/

'A British man exposed to the risk of hantavirus while travelling on the same plane as an infected cruise ship passenger had to contact UK health authorities himself, The Telegraph can reveal.

Daniel Haywood-Stone, 29, a chef, flew from Saint Helena to Johannesburg on April 25 on the same flight as a Dutch woman who died from the rat-borne virus the next day.

The woman, 69, and her 70-year-old husband, who had died on the ship and whose body was also aboard the flight, are believed to have been the first people to have caught the virus after bird-watching at a landfill site in South America before joining the MV Hondius for the cruise.

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Wednesday that it had launched a test-and-trace campaign to track the 82 passengers who travelled on the Airlink flight.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is following up with any contacts who are in England while the WHO leads the international public health effort.

It is understood that only a small number of contacts are being sought by the UK health officials in relation to the outbreak.

Mr Haywood-Stone, from Bognor Regis, was on the plane after holidaying on Saint Helena with his grandmother. He was not made aware of his exposure risk until 10 days later, by which time he had arrived in the UK and returned to work.

Having seen a Facebook post about the WHO’s efforts to track down the passengers on May 5, he contacted the UKHSA himself.

“The fact that I had to reach out to them myself made me concerned about how well they are actually doing this contact tracing or if everyone’s just finding out from social media,” he told The Telegraph.

Mr Haywood-Stone flew out to Saint Helena with his grandmother, who was born in the British overseas territory, on April 11 for a two-week holiday and flew back alone via South Africa on April 25.

At the time of his departure, he was unaware that he was boarding the plane with infected passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship which had docked at the island the day before.'

Some of the top scientists who warned the WHO that they believed Covid was airborne in the early days, have formally raised concerns about wanting Hantavirus to be treated as airborne until proven otherwise. They cite a 2018 outbreak where people contracted the disease despite no direct and sustained contact with the infected. It’s been documented in (I believe) the BMJ & peer reviewed.

I don’t think reflecting on the WHO and governments approach to this outbreak, particularly in the light of experts coming forward and raising concerns, is scaremongering.

They've probably been told to go home and isolate for a while until they are sure they're not infected.

Covid has no lessons to teach us about how to manage hantavirus. Covid was a new disease, an unknown quantity; medical experts didn't even know at first what organism was causing the illness, never mind how to treat it. Hantavirus is well-documented and the medical experts know exactly what they're dealing with. Don't start imagining that because you lived through a pandemic, you know how to manage diseases better than the people at the ECDC or the WHO. And stop worrying.

Sadly, Covid was the example of how dissociated the society actually is and how easily people would forget about others' needs and safety.

The problem is it only takes one or two people to be careless to transmit a virus.

98% of the population could have learned to control it impeccably and do all the right things, but the 2% who haven't will transmit it to everyone else.

It simply isn't really possible. Humanity is imperfect and always will be.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't all be careful (if there were another lockdown I would follow all the rules again, 100%), but we have to accept that we can't actually completely control these things, there is only damage limitation.

It is thought to be the same strain as the Andes 2018 one where 11 people died.

The man in that case managed to infect a person he only passed very briefly (one on the way to the toilet, a couple at a seperate table etc.)

Therefore I'm not that reassured. It clearly has, then and now, the potential to be very contagious.

This was novel then (hence it is referenced to as the 'Andes' strain). It is still not completely understood.

And in this recent case people have caught it by sharing the same airplane as infected people.

Grow up and do some research! It’s nothing like Covid, it’s generally not highly contagious between humans and is primarily transmitted to people from rodents. While most strains do not spread person-to-person, the Andes virus strain can rarely spread between people through close, prolonged contact. The risk to the general public remains low. And this is why people do not need to be locked away!

I don’t know. I don’t think you’d want to be patient zero would you? I can’t imagine they would take the risk. Can you imagine the shame of causing an outbreak? I expect with such small numbers of people there has been a thorough assessment.

Between 1.4-2.6m died of Covid in China so all that isolating didn’t do much good really , did it?

I don’t think the Andes strain was novel in 2018? It was discovered in the 1990s I believe? And confirmed to have human to human transmission then as well.

I don’t think you can keep people on a ship. It’s not like a hotel. Half the passengers and all the crew have no natural light. The crew live in very close proximity, yet need to move around the ship to feed people and run the ship.

This. No we haven't learned anything - Mumsnetters continue to scaremonger and catastrophise.

Grow up is such a puerile attempt to get a point across in a discussion among adults.
It's not highly contagious, no but it has a very high fatality rate. 40-50%.

Posters are right, these people ought to quarantine but public health authorities on the back foot as ever.

Staying on the ship may not have been practical, but they could - and should - have taken the ship to a port with a nearby quarantine centre and kept everyone there. Not put people onto long-haul flights.* *

Even if there's no asymptomatic transmission (and it is an if, several Hantavirus experts have said there are indications it could be transmisable 24 hours before symptom onset), it's perfectly possible to board a long-haul flight without symptoms and develop them during the 8-12 hours you're in the air.

And 72-hour assessment for something with a 5-week incubation period is ridiculous.

Walk around any city for a few hours and it won't take long to see that a significant portion of people aren't bothered by shame.

I see the armchair virologists have resurfaced. How I have missed you.

Well, this ‘opinion’ of experts does put me on edge: https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj.s919

I can’t believe these people were put on any random flights with other passengers to fly around the world considering how it spreads.

I learnt how to use Zoom as a result of Covid, and I did like the peace and quiet (except for compulsory saucepan banging on Thursdays evenings).