Acting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya urged the public not to panic over the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship, underscoring that it’s not like COVID-19.
Bhattacharya, who also helms the National Institutes of Health (NIH), defended the CDC’s contact tracing methods revolving around the seven passengers who already flew back several weeks ago, and insisted the agency is following its protocols.
“I don’t want to cause a public panic,” Bhattacharya told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “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.”
Hantavirus, a disease commonly found in rodents, can cause nasty symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhea, fevers, lung issues, and more.
A staggering 38% of those who get respiratory symptoms die, per the CDC.
While hantavirus can spread from person to person, it requires close contact and is widely seen as much less contagious than the COVID-19 respiratory illness, experts say.
An outbreak took place on the MV Hondius cruise ship, which had about 150 people on board before it began disembarking over the weekend.
At least three passengers have died and five others were seriously ill with hantavirus symptoms since April 11, according to World Health Organization officials.
The ship anchored near Spain’s Canary Islands, where passengers have begun disembarking. There are 17 American passengers aboard that ship, who may quarantine at a facility in Nebraska once they get back in the US.
“The CDC has been in contact with each of the passengers,” Bhattacharya explained. “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.”
Bhattacharya noted that the CDC is following the protocols used in 2018 during the Andes hantavirus outbreak in Epuyén, Argentina. That outbreak caused 11 deaths.
“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, and then be put in the control, put under the auspices of their state and local public health agencies, with the CDC support all the way,” the acting CDC director said.
The seven American passengers who departed the ship last month after the first passenger died are spread out across Arizona, California, Georgia, Texas, and Virginia.
It can take some six weeks before people start showing hantavirus symptoms.
The acting CDC boss explained that passengers who flew on flights with those seven Americans are “considered contacts of contacts” and do not require a more rigorous check on how far the potential spread may have gone.
“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. “But you do want to make sure that you check them regularly, so that … if they develop symptoms or if there’s other considerations, give them advice especially to reduce their contacts with others when it’s appropriate to do so.”
Bhattacharya also underscored that he and the appropriate CDC teams “have been tracking the situation for a while now.”
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