American health officials moved Sunday to contain a wave of public anxiety over the hantavirus outbreak linked to the MV Hondius cruise ship, after one of 17 US citizens being repatriated from the vessel tested mildly positive for the Andes strain — triggering comparisons to COVID-19 that the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flatly rejected.
“This is not Covid,” CDC acting director Jay Bhattacharya told CNN’s State of the Union. “We shouldn’t be panicking when the evidence doesn’t warrant it.”
The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed that two American passengers aboard the repatriation flight were of medical concern — one showing mild symptoms and another testing mildly positive by PCR without displaying symptoms. Both were traveling in the aircraft’s biocontainment units as a precaution. The remaining 15 American passengers were described as asymptomatic.
The flight was bound for Omaha, Nebraska, where the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s biocontainment unit — one of the few facilities in the United States specifically designed to handle highly infectious disease cases — had been activated ahead of the arrivals. A spokesperson for the medical center, Kayla Thomas, said passengers were expected to land early Monday morning. The passenger who tested positive but showed no symptoms would be transported directly to the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit upon arrival. The others would go to the National Quarantine Unit for individual assessment and monitoring.
Quarantine is not automatic. Bhattacharya said the protocol would involve interviewing each passenger and assessing their specific risk based on how closely they had interacted with symptomatic individuals aboard the ship.
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Depending on that assessment, passengers could remain in Nebraska voluntarily or be driven home — with precautions taken to avoid exposing others during the journey. All would remain under health authority observation for several weeks regardless of where they ended up, consistent with the approach taken with seven other Americans who had disembarked from the Hondius earlier in its journey.
The CDC’s position on transmission provides the scientific basis for that measured approach. The agency’s guidance states that people infected with hantavirus “are generally only contagious when they exhibit symptoms” — meaning the asymptomatic positive case, while requiring monitoring, does not carry the same transmission risk that an equivalent scenario would in a respiratory illness capable of spreading before symptoms appear.
Bhattacharya pointed to a 2018 outbreak of the identical Andes strain as evidence that the virus, while dangerous, is containable with established protocols. “If the threat level were higher, then we would have obviously reacted differently,” he said, responding to criticism that US health authorities had been slow to communicate publicly about the situation in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic’s damage to institutional credibility.
The Andes strain is the only known hantavirus variant capable of person-to-person transmission, which is what distinguishes this outbreak from most hantavirus cases — typically contracted through contact with infected rodents or their droppings rather than from other humans.
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The virus was traced to a landfill near Ushuaia, Argentina, where the MV Hondius had begun its voyage on April 1. Three passengers have died since the ship departed: the first at sea on April 11, the second in Johannesburg on April 26 after being evacuated to South Africa, and the third aboard the vessel on May 2.
The ship arrived in the port of Granadilla in Tenerife’s Canary Islands on Sunday under a security perimeter of one nautical mile, with Spain describing the multinational disembarkation operation — involving 23 countries, military police, disaster response teams and repatriation aircraft from multiple nations — as unprecedented. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus traveled to Tenerife personally to oversee the operation, praising Spain’s response while urging the public not to draw automatic parallels with COVID-19. The transmission dynamics, the containment requirements and the scale of risk are fundamentally different, health officials across multiple countries have stressed.
The public fear, however, has been running ahead of the epidemiology. Six years after a pandemic that exposed the gap between what governments said in the early days and what eventually unfolded, skepticism about official reassurances is embedded in public consciousness in a way that health authorities are navigating carefully. Bhattacharya’s repeated insistence that “this is not Covid” reflects an awareness that the comparison is the primary driver of anxiety — and that addressing it directly and repeatedly is as much a part of the public health response as the biocontainment units waiting in Nebraska.