‘Not like Covid’: Indian-American scientist says there is no need to panic over Hantavirus in US

Indian-origin scientist Jay Bhattacharya has urged Americans not to panic over the hantavirus outbreak linked to a cruise ship near Spain’s Canary Islands, insisting the situation is “not Covid” and is unlikely to spiral into a large-scale public health crisis.Speaking on CNN’s ‘State of the Union’ on Sunday, the acting Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the outbreak was being handled under long-established hantavirus containment protocols that had worked successfully in the past.“I don’t want to cause a public panic,” Bhattacharya said.He said: “We want to treat it with our hantavirus protocols that were successful at containing outbreaks in the past.”“The key message I want to send to your audience is that this is not COVID. This is not going to lead to the [same] kind of outbreak,” he added. “We shouldn’t be panicking when the evidence doesn’t warrant it.”The outbreak occurred aboard the expedition cruise ship MV ‘Hondius’, which was carrying around 150 passengers. According to World Health Organization (WHO) officials, at least three passengers have died while five others became seriously ill with hantavirus symptoms since April 11.Hantavirus is commonly linked to rodents and can cause severe respiratory illness, fever, vomiting and diarrhoea. The CDC says around 38 per cent of patients who develop respiratory symptoms die from the disease. However, health experts stress that the virus spreads far less easily than Covid-19 and usually requires close contact for person-to-person transmission.The ship has since anchored near the Canary Islands, where passengers have begun disembarking. Seventeen Americans were reportedly on board, with some expected to quarantine at a specialist facility in Nebraska after returning to US.Bhattacharya defended the CDC’s response, saying health officials had already contacted affected passengers and were closely monitoring the situation.“The CDC has been in contact with each of the passengers,” he explained.He added: “We’re doing interviews with them, and we’re preparing to have them evacuated to the Nebraska facility at the University of Nebraska, which is a fantastic facility.”He said the agency was following the same strategy used during the 2018 Andes hantavirus outbreak in Epuyén, Argentina, which killed 11 people.“It will include advice given to these … travelers, including an offer to stay in Nebraska if they’d like, or if they want to go back home, and their home situation allows it, to safely drive them home without exposing other people on the way,” he said.Seven American passengers had already left the ship weeks earlier after the first death was reported. They later travelled to states including Arizona, California, Georgia, Texas and Virginia. Hantavirus symptoms can take up to six weeks to appear so the health authorities still monitoring them.Bhattacharya also explained why the CDC was not tracing every airline passenger who may have travelled near those individuals.“The passengers on the ship that flew home were not symptomatic when they flew home,” he said. “Because the virus doesn’t spread unless somebody has active symptoms, those passengers on the planes are considered contacts of contacts.”“There’s not a reason to do that kind of sort of recursive contact tracing,” he added.Bhattacharya also heads the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and was confirmed last year by the US Senate. He was born in Kolkata and is a professor of health policy at Stanford University and became internationally known during the Covid-19 pandemic as a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticised lockdowns and vaccine mandates.