Hantavirus is Not the Next Pandemic

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Hi there. Today I'd like to talk about a relatively obscure disease that I think just doesn't get the attention it deserves from the mainstream media. It's called haunt virus.

[00:00:14]Okay, obviously I'm joking. Thanks to our collective COVID related PTSD, the entire world is now talking about haunt virus. And many people are concerned that we are h hurtling towards another round of sheltering in place while Donald Trump talks about injecting bleach into his veins as a cure and millions of people die. So let me start by saying that all of the experts say that the risk of that happening is very very low. Well, the the bleach thing that might actually happen, but the sheltering in place and the millions of people dying part that is very low. If you missed what's been going on, first of all, drop your mental health routine in the comments below so I can do whatever you're doing to avoid this kind of news. Second of all, what happened is that back in April, an elderly man fell sick with flu-l like symptoms and died suddenly while he was on a cruise ship that had just left Argentina. And a few days later, his wife also got sick and died after disembarking at the next stop. A third passenger fell critically ill on the way to the next stop after that. And at that point, lab testing confirmed that the culprit was haunt virus. At that point, it was brought to the attention of the World Health Organization and made public to the world. Uh but despite public calls for the ship to be immediately blown up at sea with all remaining passengers aboard and never spoken of again, public health authorities tracked down everyone who had already disembarked to check on them for symptoms. and they uh sent the ship to the Canary Islands to drop everyone else off and isolate them for a while, leaving only uh a skeleton crew, probably could have picked a better word there, remaining aboard the ship to get it back to its home base in the Netherlands. As of this recording, there have been a total of eight confirmed cases and three deaths, all of whom were the passengers and uh crew on the ship, which means a case fatality ratio of 38%.

[00:02:26]That sounds super scary. Of course, in 2020, COVID ran rampant through the passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and that only killed 14 or so, which was about 2% of them. Of course, back then, conservatives along with people like Jay Bodacharia argued that the case fatality rate for CO was probably only like 0.01% or something. Nowhere near close to 2%.

[00:02:56]But you know what? We'll come back to that. But this haunt virus strains very high mortality rate is part of the reason why it's probably not going to become our next pandemic. Unlike COVID, we have decent evidence to suggest that this only spreads once symptoms appear.

[00:03:15]And once those symptoms do appear, you know, they start off feeling like the flu, but they very quickly get so severe that the patient isn't going to be getting on an airplane or singing in their church choir. Research on this Honda virus, which is known as the Andes virus because of where it's usually found, suggests that while it is the only strain that might spread from human to human as opposed to from rodent to human like the other strains, it requires really sustained contact in order for it to make the leap to other people. And when I say sustained contact, I mean like [ __ ] In 2007, Chilean researchers tracked 76 patients with the Andes virus and 467 of the people those patients lived with. They found that only 1.2% of household members also got the virus, while 17.6% of sex partners got it. Hey, post-prouction. Rebecca here. I release these videos early to my patrons at patreon.com/rebecca.

[00:04:22]And for this video, uh, one of my patrons, Mark, pointed me toward an Atlantic article that pushes back on the close contact. The crux of the argument here is that a 2020 study described an outbreak of the Andes virus in Argentina in which 34 people were infected and 11 died thanks to three symptomatic people who managed to attend social events before they got too sick to get out of bed. some of the people infected didn't spend that much time in close contact with the infected people. So, this doesn't contradict the previous research I mentioned. The authors conclude that high viral titers in combination with attendance at massive social gatherings or extensive contact among persons were associated with a higher likelihood of transmission. As in that previous research, people were far more likely to contract the virus if they were in very close contact. But yeah, if you put enough people in the same room with an infected person, some of them are going to get sick. That's why it's still important to contact trace to isolate potentially infected people and to take basic precautions like wearing a mask in crowded places when there is an elevated risk of infection, which honestly you should still be doing anyway if you enjoy, you know, not getting sick all the time. Just speaking personally as someone who doesn't get sick anymore and it's awesome. Anyway, there is one other way the Andes virus could become a pandemic besides widespread mucous orgies, and that's if it mutates. As we all know now, thanks to CO, every time a virus jumps from target to target, it can mutate, and those mutations can make it more or less deadly or more or less contagious. But once again, there's good news. Andy's virus has been known about for a long time and unlike corona viruses, it doesn't tend to change much from case to case. And the other good news is that this did not happen in the United States. So actual adults are in charge and working on it. We dropped out of the World Health Organization, but they are still in existence and they are on the case coordinating the response and making sure that contact tracing is happening. Here in the United States, uh the states where the passengers have ended up are handling it, which is good because uh remember that thing I said about some conservatives thinking that the COVID mortality rate was way lower than it was? Well, this is the [ __ ] who is currently in charge of the CDC.

[00:06:52]>> I want to ask you about concerns we've heard from a lot of public health officials about the CDC's response, or as they say, it lack thereof. Uh they say that the CDC should have deployed a team to help investigate the outbreak.

[00:07:03]They say the CDC should have deployed a team to collect samples to help with contact tracing. They say the CDC should have been communicating sooner through press briefings and press guidance and news briefings and that its health alert network uh should have been more active and been more clear about how the CDC is involved, especially since we're no longer part of the World Health Organization. They say that this vi this had been had this been a virus that spreads more easily than the HT virus, we would be in real trouble right now.

[00:07:28]How do you respond to all these critics?

[00:07:32]>> Well, I think it's uh they didn't see what the CD's been doing CDC has been doing, right? So we are in touch with the WHO, we're in touch with the uh the international organiza uh international health organizations including the one in Spain. Um and we have been providing technical assistance to all of those organizations all the all the way through. Um this is not co uh Jake and we don't want to treat it like co we want to don't want to cause a public panic over this. We want to treat it with a havirus protocols that we that were again were successful in containing outbreaks in the past. Uh and so we we followed those protocols like we gave health this health alert um is is coming out because again there's this discreet event of the 17 arriving in the United States very very soon. Um uh and so we just want to make sure that the medical community understands this. We've been communicating the last week as the as sort of the the press attention has picked up um more with the public as as is appropriate given the nature of this disease. The key message I want to send to your audience is that this is not co this is not going to have lead to the kind of outbreak and I'm I was pleased by to hear your um the the opening segment where you emphasize that because we shouldn't be panicking when the the the evidence doesn't warrant it.

[00:08:41]>> So no h virus is probably not going to be our next global pandemic. So you can stop worrying about it if you were depending on where you live of course.

[00:08:52]Here in the United States, it is still rare, although experts are concerned that we might see more thanks to climate change. That's right. It's yet another thing climate change might [ __ ] up. Um, people, most people get it by breathing in droppings from uh rodents, from mice and rats. And there's usually an increase in cases following heavy downpours because those rains bring more vegetation which provides more food for rodents which leads to more interactions between rodents and humans. So if you have rodents in your house, uh please take precautions. You should wear a respirator when cleaning it up. And a good rule is to cover the poop with a paper towel before spraying it with bleach because that will pre prevent the particles from floating up into the air and then into your body. I'll end with a fun little fact that I learned only recently thanks to this news. Humans have likely been describing haunt virus for centuries, maybe even millennia. It first came to the attention of the West in the 1950s because American soldiers started getting it while stationed in Korea. It was finally isolated to study scientifically in 1976 by a Korean epidemiologist named Ho Wang Lee who had spent years on this project and it was so dangerous that his own team kept falling ill. After isolating the virus, Lee was then able to research it and develop diagnostic criteria to identify the disease in humans. Finally, in 1989, he developed a vaccine against the virus, making him the first person in the history of medicine to discover a disease, develop the diagnostic criteria for it, and then make a vaccine for it.

[00:10:49]Ho Wangley was Haunt Virus's number one op. He saw people dying and said, "Not on my watch, you little bitch." Or I don't know, however you say that in Korean. I I don't speak Korean. Anyway, badass guy, Ho Wang Lee, and a good role model for how you should feel about haunt virus. Be careful, be smart, but don't be scared.

[00:11:20]Hey everybody, thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like. If you loved the video, please subscribe. And if you think the world could use more videos like this and you happen to have a few bucks laying around, head to patreon.com/rebecca and join an awesome community of nerds like the people whose names you see on the screen right now. Thanks.