No one should panic, but this is “certainly a worrying chain of events,” said Tara C. Smith in MS.now. Two weeks ago, news broke that three people aboard the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius had died of suspected hantavirus, a respiratory disease with no cure or vaccine. The Hondius was eventually allowed to dock in Tenerife, Spain. But before the pathogen was identified, some 30 passengers had disembarked and flown home to 12 countries, potentially seeding the planet with a virus that kills 38% of its victims. A six-week incubation period means we don’t yet know the extent of the outbreak. But at least eight other Hondius-linked infections have been confirmed, and 18 Americans are being monitored, two at containment facilities in Atlanta—one of those passengers is symptomatic—and 16 in Nebraska.
“I hope it’s fine,” said President Trump. But Trump also hoped it would be fine in February 2020, when passengers on another ship, the Diamond Princess, started dying from Covid-19. And back then, we were still part of the World Health Organization—Trump ordered the U.S. out last year—and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wasn’t our health secretary. “We are in the hands of the madmen now,” said Charles P. Pierce in Esquire. “An outbreak of any disease more serious than Covid, and this country is in a world of hurt.”
This story is certainly “tragic,” said Lisa Jarvis in Bloomberg. The first two fatalities, a Dutch couple, were probably infected through exposure to rat droppings while bird-watching in Argentina. But “this likely isn’t the opening scene for a bigger, scarier movie.” The human-transmissible strain of hantavirus is not very infectious, requiring prolonged contact with someone already suffering symptoms. Standard public health measures have contained previous outbreaks, the worst being a 2018 outbreak in Epuyén, Argentina, in which 11 died. Experts say there’s little reason to fear the new cluster will “turn into anything bigger.”
Which experts? asked Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times. Microbiologist Gustavo Palacios, who studied the Epuyén outbreak, is “baffled” by these reassurances. In Epuyén, a single guest at a birthday party infected five others in 90 minutes, and the widow of one victim infected 10 more people at his wake. These “super-spreader” events suggest the virus could spark a pandemic. We may have been spared in 2018 because Epuyén is an “isolated rural village in Patagonia.” The 2026 Hondius outbreak, by contrast, has already gone global and, as with the early days of Covid, global health leaders are erring on the side of reassurance rather than sharing, “accurately and loudly,” what little we know about this terrifying virus.
In the U.S., the response has been “sluggish,” said Apoorva Mandavilli, also in the Times. It took a week after WHO formally confirmed the hantavirus infections for the administration to hold its first briefing, and a month after the first death to set up a CDC task force. Hollowed out by Trump and Kennedy, our health agencies aren’t remotely ready for another pandemic, said Katrine Wallace in StatNews. Not so our post-Covid infrastructure of misinformation, that “network of influencers, conspiracy accounts, and partisan personalities.” They’re already spinning this outbreak as further proof that “scientists are corrupt, vaccines are the real threat” and hawking ivermectin from “the link in their bio.” It’s this new infrastructure, along with Trump’s vandalism of the old one, that will hurt us the most should another pandemic arrive. “And one will.”
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