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?What happened on the cruise ship?

What is the hantavirus?What is the hantavirus?

Is this going to cause a pandemic?Is this going to cause a pandemic?

So what are the actual risks?So what are the actual risks?

What should we be doing?What should we be doing?

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