Where is Doctor Fauci When We Need Him?
Interestingly, Hantavirus’s extreme lethality might be its limitation.
Three passengers on the cruise ship MV Hondius recently died from hantavirus infection, and at least four others have been sickened, sparking fears of another global pandemic.
But epidemiologists quoted in the media—including Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Bill Hanage—said it’s unlikely that hantavirus will spread widely.
In a May 6 Newsweek article, Hanage and other experts spoke about the hantavirus’ virulence and transmissibility.
They noted that the virus—which typically spreads among rodents—does not spread easily in humans, or before those infected start showing symptoms, unlike the flu or SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19). Even on a cruise ship where people live in close quarters for an extended period, transmission remained limited to a few people with the closest contact.
Hanage said, “It’s not the case fatality rate that matters for pandemic potential, it’s the ability to transmit between humans. If transmission happens efficiently enough before people become seriously ill, then there are very few constraints on virulence.”
Other experts noted that the hantavirus would need to undergo multiple evolutionary changes to become a pandemic threat.
Three people died aboard a cruise ship in the Atlantic within three weeks this May. Seven cases of hantavirus—two laboratory confirmed, five suspected—have been identified on the MV Hondius, anchored off Cape Verde. Illness struck rapidly.
Fever, gastrointestinal symptoms, pneumonia, respiratory distress, shock. One patient in critical condition. Another evacuated from the ship in an ambulance boat. The rare Andes strain of hantavirus, confirmed May 6, is known for something that should terrify public health officials: It can spread from person to person.
Yet epidemiologists are not panicking. There will be no lockdowns, no travel bans, no breathless warnings of a pandemic-in-waiting. The disease that killed between 30 and 60 percent of those infected in previous outbreaks is, paradoxically, the very reason it cannot cause a global crisis. Hantavirus’s extreme lethality is its limitation.
“Pandemic potential is mostly about transmission architecture, not lethality,” Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Newsweek. “The biology that drives pandemics is how a pathogen moves between people—not how sick it makes them.”
When the cruise ship outbreak made headlines, public anxiety spiked. People online speculated about pandemic risk. Social media filled with fears. But the mechanism experts worry about when assessing pandemic threat has almost nothing to do with how deadly a virus is.
It has everything to do with whether people can spread it before they get so sick, they stop moving around.
