Where the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak stands as health officials monitor 18 Americans

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]So, Hantavirus outbreak update. The total number of confirmed and suspected cases has reached 11. Eight The 18 Americans that were potentially exposed on a cruise ship are in quarantine in Nebraska and Georgia. CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Celine Gounder joins me now. Dr. Gounder, uh catch us up in terms of what's going on with the Americans and what the messaging is to Americans about the relative risk to them in quarantine and to the population in general.

[00:00:35]So, Nebraska Medical Center is one of the best biocontainment units in the country. 16 passengers are in quarantine there. One is in a higher-level unit uh because of a positive test result. So, that person is in what we call isolation uh because we are worried that they may in fact have Hantavirus, whereas the others are strictly uh just exposed and so are just being quarantined. There are also two passengers who went to Emory in Atlanta, a couple, one of whom was having symptoms. But uh as far as we've been told, there's no testing schedule for the passengers who have no symptoms, and the start date of their 42-day monitoring period has not been set.

[00:01:17]Theoretically, it really should be day zero should be the date of disembarkation because that's the last known date of potential exposure.

[00:01:25]Um it's also important to understand that there are no FDA-approved treatments for the Hantavirus. The most promising antibody treatment was shelved last year when its funding ran out. So, if patients worsen, the care is supportive only. So, things like ventilators, ECMO, which is a heart-lung bypass machine, there is no specific drug to give them, and the tools that doctors have for patients who get sicker are the same as really they had 30 years ago.

[00:01:55]So, when you try, Dr. Gounder, to assess the risk in this scenario, how are you doing that?

[00:02:03]I think some people are comparing this to COVID. Um, they are uh right in certain respects. This is a novel, uh at least to them, uh virus.

[00:02:14]This is something that's coming out of the blue to them. But, COVID is spread easily through the air, often from people with no symptoms, and it infects both the upper and lower respiratory tracts.

[00:02:26]Uh it is also, um an infection to which no one had any previous, uh immunity in the past. Um whereas, hantavirus doesn't spread in the same way. It is a lower respiratory tract infection. Um we, because of the incubation period, we had a long head start, uh before um some of these people started to get sick, this the second round of of cases. Um and so, that gave us time, actually, to contain this. Um however, the response infrastructure is weaker now than it was in 2020. We have no CDC director. You have the NIH director who's acting as CDC director, so wearing both hats. Uh the FDA commissioner was, uh well, says he resigned. Um the United States has left the WHO. Um Secondly, you also have, uh public reaction. You have millions of people who are feeling déjà vu from 2020, and a lot of concern that this could spiral. They're concerned that the government may not be honest with them.

[00:03:28]And I think this is really, uh fear about COVID that is still, um lingering.

[00:03:34]And this new virus, at least to them, hantavirus, is triggering that old alarm. And we really need to acknowledge that before trying to reassure people, because if we don't, we lose the audience before we even get to the facts.

[00:03:48]In the medical literature, there is quite a bit of data about a 200 to 2018 outbreak that occurred at a birthday party, I believe, in Argentina. What did that teach us about how hantavirus spreads?

[00:04:03]Yeah, so this was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. This is the Epuyen outbreak. It's a small town in Patagonia, in Argentina.

[00:04:10]Uh one person got infected from rodent droppings. They attended a birthday party while sick, and then the virus spread from there. A total of 34 people were infected, 11 died. And what they found in this study was that the um spread was driven by just a few sick people with very high viral loads, who spent an extended period of time in enclosed spaces with many other people.

[00:04:33]Once officials enforced isolation uh for the cases and quarantine of contacts, transmission dropped from about two uh cases per original uh case to below one.

[00:04:47]And so, once you get to below one, you that's where you stop the outbreak. And here's what matters. Now, most of the transmission in that outbreak tracked with close, prolonged contact. But there were three cases in that in that total outbreak that could not be explained in that way. Um where some form of droplets in the air uh would be the simplest uh explanation, and there are three people who tested positive without s- uh intimate contact with other known cases.

[00:05:16]So, we may be seeing that picture. I think the CDC's current threshold, which is going to sound familiar to people because it's what it's what we actually use for infection control and droplets, is within 6 ft for 15 minutes in an in an in an enclosed space is considered being a contact. So, that's the cutoff uh to determine if you're high risk for quarantine decisions.

[00:05:39]Dr. Celine Gounder, thank you so very much. Appreciate it.