Americans from Hantavirus Cruise Begin Quarantine

追加: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]It's Tuesday, May 12th. American cruisers now in quarantine. We start here.

[00:00:09]18 people in the US are being closely monitored for signs of hantavirus. We want to do [music] this in the most in the least restrictive way possible that is still safe. At least one who's stateside has already tested positive [music] and another showing symptoms. What do we really know about how the virus spreads?

[00:00:25]It can spread person to person through close contact.

[00:00:28]>> We'll ask an expert about documented hantavirus super spreaders. And how about shaving 18 cents off the growing price of gas? [music] Drivers would be paying a little bit less. The federal government would also be getting less in revenue.

[00:00:42]>> President proposes a gas [music] tax holiday.

[00:00:46]From ABC News, this is Start Here. I'm Steven [music] Portnoy.

[00:00:53]Hey, Brad's out today, but I've got you covered from DC.

[00:00:58]17 Americans and a Brit who sailed on the Dutch cruise ship that's been the center of a hantavirus outbreak are now being monitored at US medical facilities. They were in good [music] spirits. They definitely were tired and needed some rest. So, we did a quick assessment.

[00:01:14]>> Most of them are in Nebraska. One tested positive before arriving. None has shown symptoms last we heard, but two other passengers were separated from the group and one of them is showing symptoms. We know this virus. We know how it acts and this has worked well in the past [music] to ensure that there is no further spread. Health experts insist the cruise ship outbreak does not pose a threat to the American public, but we're going to spend some time today digging deeper into this and answering some of your questions with an expert because we have questions and the research that's been done on this particular strain of virus and how it spreads is definitely worth exploring. But first, let's go to Omaha and bring in ABC's Victor Oquendo.

[00:01:55]Victor, health officials held a press conference yesterday laying all this out. What do we know about the folks who are in isolation? What does that look like? All right, Stephen. 16 total passengers here in Omaha. For the 15 who are symptom-free, they have their own rooms, kind of like a hotel. Um it is much more like a hotel uh than um than a patient care space. We don't have the typical things that you'd see in a hospital room. Um it's a much more comfortable environment, actually. Um They're trying to make them as comfortable as possible, giving them things like exercise equipment, space to move around the room, and any technology that is accessible. They can, you know, conduct uh you know, phone conversations, um you know, video uh teleconferencing with family members and friends. Uh but there's no intermingling of uh any of the quarantined individuals. There's They do not have any visitors. That is not permitted as of now. But they also have a healthcare team that comes in and checks on them.

[00:02:46]It is designed to house a large group of patients or uh passengers from a plane or a ship like what we have now, to monitor and assess them.

[00:02:55]Um if they get symptomatic, become sick, they can be moved into the bio into the bio containment system and have a higher level of care. For the American who tested positive, they're in a biocontainment unit. It's more like a traditional hospital room. The biocontainment unit is like a very well-managed air handled intensive care unit. We're told that person is symptom-free. They're in good spirits, good appetite, just understandably tired from the long journey. Then there are the two others that are in Atlanta, taken to Emory University Hospital. Now, tell us about that couple. Why aren't they in Omaha? This was a bit of a surprise. We know that one of them had symptoms and they were taken to Emory University, the hospital there. Both are here at Emory in our Serious Communicable Diseases Unit. One is undergoing uh treatment, and the other one is undergoing further evaluation and monitoring. Health officials here at the University of Nebraska Medical Center want to make sure that they have enough space inside their facility in the event that there were any more positive cases or someone takes a turn. We want to maintain optimal space in our biocontainment facilities on the small chance that it becomes necessary to use that space given the individuals who are transported. All right, so back to Omaha. Do the people who are there have to stay for what we're told is an incubation period of up to 42 days, 6 weeks? What happens if they want to go home? What have you been hearing from officials there? Those 16 people here in Omaha will be closely watched over the next few days and if they are symptom-free and clear, they can return home and quarantine there. They certainly have the option to stay here for the entire 42-day period if that's just the safest safest and most effective effective option for them.

[00:04:39]There's going to be an individualized decision plan for them to determine if it makes more sense for them to complete their 42-day monitoring period at home.

[00:04:47]But there's going to be a couple of things that go into to to that decision.

[00:04:50]First and foremost, do they remain symptom-free? We should note transportation would be organized at the highest levels. We will not be seeing these people on commercial flights, for example. No one who poses a risk to public health is walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha or beyond.

[00:05:08]What about the passengers who are scattered all over the world from other countries? Right, every country is different. If you look at Spain, they have a mandatory quarantine, but in the US, it's done state by state.

[00:05:19]>> We want to do this in the most in the least restrictive way possible that is still safe that protects the health and safety both the passengers and their communities. Going back to the pandemic, states had their own contact tracers who would get in touch with people directly.

[00:05:33]All right, could be a long wait for those folks in Omaha and in Atlanta waiting it out. ABC's Victor Oquendo in Nebraska, thanks so much. You got it, Stephen.

[00:05:44]In the earliest days of the COVID pandemic, there were a lot things we heard from public health experts and politicians about the spread of the virus that uh frankly didn't hold up.

[00:05:54]I'm thinking of these moments from early March of 2020. We're prepared and we're doing a great job with it and it will go away. Just stay calm, it will go away.

[00:06:02]You cannot contract it through casual contact, so the subway is not the issue.

[00:06:06]>> Should we all be wearing masks? No. Why?

[00:06:09][music] Because right now there isn't anything going around in the community, certainly not coronavirus, that is calling for the broad use of masks.

[00:06:18]>> Of course, within a few weeks those same officials reversed themselves, explaining that they'd learned more. And that's understandable when you're dealing with something new. Doctors study and learn, and [music] so do we.

[00:06:29]But looking back at the things that were first said about COVID also reminds us to be a bit circumspect, cautious, before we're definitive. So, with that in mind, let's dig into what we know about hantavirus, the Andes strain in particular, which we know can pass from person to person. Let's bring in John Brownstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School, an epidemiologist, and an ABC News medical contributor.

[00:06:49]John, thanks for being with us. I want to be very careful with this. What are we certain we know about this virus and how it spreads? Well, thanks so much for having me on. And I I really do want to stress the difference between COVID, because you you you brought that up in the intro, and it's important to say that this is not a new virus. COVID was a new virus that we were learning about in real time.

[00:07:11]>> Mhm. The Andes strain of hantavirus is something that we've known about for decades. Now, is it a heavily studied virus? No. Um is there enough funding to support research uh in this space?

[00:07:22]Probably not. But this is not a new virus, and we can give reasonable authoritative advice on what we think will play out. So, this Andes strain, which usually spreads from rodents to people through urine, droppings, and uh saliva, but it can spread person to person through close contact. Now, the definition of close contact is it keeps us a little bit uh concerned because we don't know what that actually means, but remember, we're taking a virus that is reasonably well studied, but we're putting it onto a ship. And a ship is by definition close contact. So, you have either direct physical contact with someone who's sick or someone that has had prolonged time in a close quarter with asymptomatic person. So, sharing a cabin or the caregivers or or sitting near someone in those shared spaces is something that you would expect to see transmission. Even though this is not something we see that often, it can happen. Typically, we're talking about exposure specifically to body bodily fluids, and then that could include things like saliva. So, if you're sharing eating utensils, um kissing, touching, those type of things. It can also mean uh just being really, really close to that to that person for a fairly long period of time.

[00:08:30]>> But, it's not airborne in the way that we think of measles or COVID. This is risk through inhaling aerosolized particles. Again, either through those droppings or urine, uh or through that close contact. So, worried about the the passengers on the ship, worried about the crew, worried about those taking care of the passengers, but generally from a public health perspective, the risk is incredibly low, and this should not create the same level of fear that we had with COVID. That being said, I recognize our collective trauma as a result of the pandemic. All right. Well, I do want to ask you this cuz there's an article in the New England Journal of Medicine for 2020 that lays out how this particular strain of hantavirus spread in Argentina in late 2018. It started at a birthday party. It went from one person to five guests at that party. One of those five then spread it to six more people, and when one of the patients died, 10 more got it at the wake.

[00:09:25]In all, there were 34 cases in Argentina over a span of 4 months. 11 people died, and we obviously don't want anyone to be unduly alarmed, but those are the facts of what happened in Argentina with this particular strain. In fact, this article in the New England Journal of Medicine has the phrase super spreaders in the headline.

[00:09:41]So, given all that, why are officials and experts saying that this virus is hard to spread? Well, it it's a very good point and I think it's important to say that we don't know everything about this virus, but remember, people were on a ship in very close quarters and that is a recipe for efficient spread in a setting like that. Person-to-person spread can happen, but it's not as efficient as COVID and we studied that.

[00:10:08]That same paper talks about the inefficiency of spread. That being said, super spreading can happen and I remember we spoke about that quite a bit at the beginning of COVID. Close contact still is the real risk here, right? So, the paper supports the concern for direct contact exposures in these sort of spaces, whether it's at a wake or at an event or in our case a ship, but it's really um not something that we'll be seeing with airborne transmission, say of COVID, where just out in public you'll you'll see this significant amount of transmission. It's also important to note that transmission does occur very early in illness and I think the most important element of that paper is that incubation can be long. And this is the one part that I do find somewhat concerning, uh that symptoms could appear, you know, well into 40 days after infection and I think this is why some level of symptom monitoring and ideally quarantining of passengers makes sense here, because we we may not know those passengers are infected for for several weeks. We have this under control and we're not worried about it.

[00:11:14]It seems like it is not easy to spread.

[00:11:19]>> Yes, it's droplets or aerosolized particles, but no, it's not uh airborne.

[00:11:24]And so, yes, there could be events of super spreading, but they can only happen in these very sort of confined uh spaces. Okay, but if you can get it at a birthday party and awake, can you get it on an airplane? You know, we haven't yet seen this, uh but it is a concern of mine that there were passengers that left the ship and and were not part of this a process of sort of a controlled setting to get home. And this is why there's active efforts to monitor the individuals that left, um track them, monitor their symptoms, actively engage in contact tracing. And this is why basic public health is important here. We need, you know, control trolling the infection with isolation, proper PPE, social distancing, contact tracing. This is all around those that are that were impacted by the outbreak, but it's it shows that this is containable. Yes, we have to be vigilant and especially as we think about where all these people went around the world, but it is not cause for generalized public concern. You know, Maryland officials announced late yesterday they're going to monitor two residents who traveled abroad briefly on the same flight as passengers from the cruise ship, just in case they were exposed in flight. And we should also stress, and you mentioned this, that it's documented that it is spread at these super spreader events when people are sick, that they have a fever, perhaps they're coughing. They're obviously sick. Yes, so that is the data shows that the bulk of transmission is occurring when someone has symptoms.

[00:12:55]That is really important because part of the hallmark of COVID and why that was so concerning is the level of transmission without symptoms. And this is the concern we all have for flu and how it spreads so rapidly across the globe that you can be asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, or have minimal symptoms and spread.

[00:13:12]That is less the case here with hantavirus, which means that it's much more in our ability to contain uh through basic public health measures where COVID was much more challenging.

[00:13:23]All right, could be a long time of monitoring. It's 40-odd days is the incubation period. It's a month and a half. All right, John Brownstein, thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

[00:13:34]Next up on start here, the president proposes putting some pennies in your pocket at the pump. That's after the break.

[00:13:43]The president said yesterday the ceasefire with Iran is a shaky. I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support.

[00:13:51]>> The average price of a gallon of gas is closing in on $4.50, up more than a dollar 30 from a year ago.

[00:13:57]>> [music] >> The president suggested yesterday that maybe it's time to shave at least some of that price off by suspending the federal gas tax. Sounds simple, but nothing ever really is, is it? So, let's dig into it with ABC's Elizabeth Schulze who covers economic issues for us.

[00:14:11]Elizabeth, what exactly was this suggestion from the president yesterday?

[00:14:14]Yes, so Steven, President Trump wants to temporarily get rid of the federal gas tax as a way to try to alleviate some of this pain at the pump. So, what we're talking about here is an 18.4 cent tax on every gallon of gas. So, that's 18.4 cents that goes to the federal government every time you're buying a gallon of gas, every time people fill up.

[00:14:35]>> How long are you going to suspend suspend that tax for?

[00:14:38]Uh till it's appropriate, yeah. The president is saying that for a short time, he didn't really specify how long or exactly when this would happen, that tax should be lifted as a way to bring prices down. And as you say, this would, you know, provide some temporary relief with where prices are right now with the national average, it would bring us up to about $4.30 a gallon, but we're talking about prices that are up $1.54 since the start of the war. One analyst I was talking to about this said that this would ultimately end up saving drivers about $3.30 every time you fill up an empty tank.

[00:15:16]>> It's a it's a, you know, it's a small percentage, but it's a, you know, it's still money. So, it's not nothing, but it's also not much when you're just thinking about how fast these prices have been going up over the past 2 months. All right. Well, it might be a fine idea, but can the president just wave a wand and suspend the gasoline tax by himself?

[00:15:34]>> Well, and this is key. No, he can't.

[00:15:36]This is something that requires congressional approval. There has been some appetite for this in Congress, you know, both Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged that gas prices are high and that this could be a way to at least temporarily bring those prices down, but even Senate Majority Leader John Thune initially threw cold water on the idea, but then seemed to say, "Well, we do understand that a lot of people are feeling the pain of these high prices." But, the wrinkle there, Stephen, is the fact that this is revenue that's going to the federal government. And the way that these gas taxes work is this funds the National Highway Trust Fund. That's used to build roads, bridges, mass transit. So, while drivers would be paying a little bit less, the federal government would also be getting less in revenues. In fact, by some estimates, we're talking about $3 billion less in revenue per month that this gas tax would be suspended. So, that's sort of a calculus that lawmakers would have to make. Not sure that it would be one you'd see overwhelming bipartisan support for, and at the end of the day, that's what you you would at least need probably some sort of bipartisan support for this to get done for this to get lifted. Speaking of money not in the government's coffers, the president in recent days has been really railing against this notion of having to pay out refunds for the tariffs that have been invalidated by the Supreme Court. You're tracking that some of these refunds are are set to be dolled out starting today. Right, these tariff refunds are going to start hitting the bank accounts of some businesses who've been applying. So, we're talking about that online portal that the government set up last month where businesses that paid those tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled were illegal could get their money back. This is a kind of complicated process for companies to submit these claims. For bigger companies, we're talking about a lot of money that they are owed.

[00:17:22]According to one analyst at City, Walmart could get $10 billion back, Target could get $2 billion, Nike $1 billion. We saw General Motors in its recent earnings report say it's expecting fully to get $500 million back. So, this is money that will start flowing to companies. I will say smaller businesses I've talked to, some of them haven't been even been able to log in yet or submit it successfully. And then the CBP a spokesperson told us that about 15% of the claims submitted actually haven't gone through because something has been wrong with the information or they included shipments that actually aren't eligible for refunds. So, you know, something So, this is the beginning of this wave of refunds. Up to $166 billion are owed to companies. So, this is something we're going to continue to see over the next few weeks, months, even longer than that.

[00:18:09]>> $10 billion to Walmart, $2 billion to Target.

[00:18:12]What about those of us who shop with those stores? Well, don't get your hopes up you're getting a refund yourself because the fact is that a lot of these companies say that they had to take a hit because of the tariffs.

[00:18:25]Businesses I've talked to say they might use this to restock inventory, to pay down debt, to rehire employees that were laid off because of the higher costs of tariffs.

[00:18:35]Maybe you might see some companies lower prices. We have seen some retailers like Costco suggest that's how they could get money back to consumers, but it's unlikely even you know, if you bought something and there was a higher price on it because of tariffs. Hard to imagine a business calling you up and saying, "Hey, we're going to give you some money back for that purchase." And you know, at the end of the day, there was a cost to consumers from this. The non-partisan Tax Foundation says that those tariffs that were struck down cost the typical household about $700 just last year. All right, Elizabeth Schulze.

[00:19:05]Thanks so much. Thank you, Stephen.

[00:19:08]Okay, one more quick break. When we come back, you can say yes to the dress, but first, sign here, please. One last thing is next.

[00:19:19]And one last thing.

[00:19:22]I'm told by pretty much every woman I've ever known that one of the great joys of being a bride is picking out your wedding dress. It's the stuff of entire magazines and TV shows like TLC's Say Yes to the Dress. Amy, are you [music] saying yes to the dress? Yes.

[00:19:38]>> Yes.

[00:19:39]What happens when you cross your dream dress with the miracles of modern medicine?

[00:19:44]It seems the increasing use of GLP-1s is making it harder for brides to settle on a dress too soon. Bridal stores are finding they've got to keep more dresses in stock to accommodate last-minute changes.

[00:19:56]>> [music] >> The Wall Street Journal reports others are laying down the law, requiring brides to sign a contract, a waiver acknowledging that if a woman buys a dress hoping she'll fit into it on her big day, that the sale is final even if she hasn't reached her target weight, or if she loses too much and the dress is suddenly too big. Now, David's Bridal is not one of those stores, but Kelly Cook, the company CEO, says things are definitely changing.

[00:20:22]Size anxiety has always been one of the number one things brides are worried about, but it's at a heightened level that we haven't seen before. Typically, she says brides buy their dresses 6 to 9 months in advance, but late last year, Cook says rush orders started picking up.

[00:20:38]>> 20% of all brides that were coming into David's Bridal, their wedding was within eight weeks.

[00:20:45]>> [laughter] >> That was That's very, very, very rare.

[00:20:48]Fittings are up, too. The average is about three to four, but we're seeing four to five now, which is about a 20% increase. This has become a real problem for some small businesses when it comes to keeping enough inventory on hand, which would explain the waivers. And so, when some brides say yes to the dress, they may also be saying yes to the stress.

[00:21:11]I can't stop thinking about that scene [music] in Bridesmaids where they go to the Brazilian steakhouse and then they go to try on the dresses. Sorry, you may have been thinking it, too. For live news anytime, you can watch ABC News Live on Hulu and anywhere you stream live news. For Brad Milky, I'm Stephen Portnoy. Have a great day.

[00:21:28]>> [music]