Johanna Jainchill
An encouraging bit of information that came out during Bank of America's Summer Travel & Entertainment Virtual Media Roundtable was that, "despite the media surrounding it," the hantavirus outbreak onboard the Dutch expedition vessel Hondius had not caused any meaningful impact on cruise purchases.
That measured response was a testament to the public's ability to cut through mainstream media noise that might have made us all think the outbreak on a small ship in South America was the onset of the next pandemic.
As Jon Stewart put it in a segment about the outbreak on "The Daily Show," the experts say "stay calm, but the news media says 'No, I believe we prefer panic.'"
There's no question that the terms used around the outbreak triggered unwelcome memories: quarantine, isolation, contact tracing. And I heard from some friends and family members who were worried.
I decided to speak to infectious disease experts myself, and they all said the same thing: this was no Covid.
"Your risk of getting hantavirus, unless you happen to be a person that was exposed to someone on this ship, is extraordinarily low," said Dr. Thomas Russo, a professor and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine at the University at Buffalo's Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.
Russo called the outbreak an "extraordinarily bad series of events": Prior to boarding the Hondius, a couple went bird-watching and acquired the one type of hantavirus, the Andes variant, that can spread person to person as opposed to only rodent to person.
"That's why there's never been a hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship before, and it's highly unlikely -- you never say never in medicine -- there will be one in the future," said Russo. He happens to enjoy cruising himself and added, "If people are cruising, hantavirus is the least of their concerns." He said he'd worry more about the "usual agents" that might spread on cruise ships: norovirus, Covid and influenza.
Russo recognizes that an outbreak of a relatively unknown virus on a cruise ship was bound to cause some PTSD.
"When you hear about something like this, where people die on a cruise ship with a virus that, even though it's known to infectious-disease physicians, it's sort of unknown to the general public, it's deja vu," he said.
A big difference, he added, is that in early 2020, the world "knew nothing about SARS-CoV-2." But hantaviruses are understood enough to know that while this strain is much more lethal than Covid, it does not spread as easily from person to person and has a long incubation period, which enables exposed individuals to be identified, quarantined and monitored "to break that infection chain."
Paradoxically, several experts noted there is an advantage of the outbreak being on a cruise ship.
"We know everyone who is exposed," Russo said, adding that it will take about six weeks to be "completely out of the woods on this" and that he wouldn't be surprised if there were some secondary cases.
But he was clear that this "is not going to be the next pandemic."
"I think TV loves the drama to keep eyeballs on the screen," Russo said. "And even though expert after expert said, 'Yes, this is not a good virus to have, yes, it's quite lethal, but it's less infectious and this is going to be a much more limited, circumscribed outbreak,' they were still amping it up and dramatizing it to a degree. And that didn't help."
I called Russo back the week after our first conversation to ask about the Ebola outbreak in central Africa, which as of May 20 had already caused far more deaths than the hantavirus outbreak.
He again said that while people should "avoid the regions with documented cases" and consider avoiding bordering regions, "because there may be some spillover that's unrecognized at this time," he would not curtail travel to other parts of the world.
Expert advice
I also spoke with Dr. Aileen Marty, a senior advisor on outbreak response for the World Health Organization, who is in the process of rewriting the manual for managing mass gatherings, such as the upcoming World Cup soccer tournament.
She said highly deadly viruses like Ebola and hantavirus are unlikely to cause pandemics but said dealing with them requires "very careful solidarity and implementation of public health measures -- and transparency."
And given how people move around the planet these days, she had some relatively simple suggestions for travelers.
"Keep your hands clean, don't touch your face. These basic things everybody learned in Covid are a good idea," Marty said. "If you have any reason to think you might be more susceptible, or if there's somebody coughing or sneezing around you, put on a mask. Protect yourself."