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Is this likely to start another pandemic? Or even a wider-scale endemic?

Hantavirus is “more lethal than COVID” but far, far less transmissible, says Professor Larry Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, in our Q&A.

“Some people in the media have overhyped it: this is not going to be a pandemic and it’s not going to be a sustained, long outbreak unless things change rapidly,” he says.

Hantavirus cannot survive on surfaces; it requires very close, prolonged contact with an infected person, Gostin says, but adds a new variant is always possible.

Cruise ships are “unique” in their risk for transmission, given passengers are crowded aboard and travel from port to port.

“This has little shades of COVID,” he adds, reminding us of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined near Japan after COVID was detected on board in February 2020.

Gostin says of that COVID example: “They were not allowed to disembark, passengers were panicked, when they did disembark, they scattered to all four corners of the world – that’s already happened with this particular outbreak of hantavirus.

“So you’ve got the perfect storm of a virus on a crowded ship where nobody takes responsibility for it, not the ship owners, not the governments on board, and then they scatter everywhere and you have inconsistent monitoring and treatment – now that is a nightmare.”

But Gostin later says the process in this hantavirus case is not being rushed.

Gostin adds: “We need to take this seriously because in many ways this is more lethal than COVID, that is, it’s more pathogenic, but it doesn’t have the capacity to transmit anywhere near Sars-COVID2.”