‘This is not COVID’: Acting CDC chief says public should not panic over hantavirus outbreak

The public should not panic about the deadly hantavirus outbreak that started on a cruise ship whose passengers and crew began disembarking Sunday at Spain’s Canary Islands, a U.S. health official said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been preparing for the 17 Americans who are disembarking to return to the United States, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the agency’s acting director, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“This is not COVID. This is not going to lead to [that] kind of outbreak,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. “We shouldn’t be panicking when the evidence doesn’t warrant it.”

Hantaviruses are carried by rodents and most often spread to people who come in contact with them or are exposed to their urine, droppings or saliva.

The World Health Organization has confirmed that the Andes virus, the only type of hantavirus known to spread person-to-person, is the strain responsible for the outbreak on the cruise ship, the MV Hondius.

The Andes virus can cause hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a severe respiratory disease.

Three passengers of the MV Hondius died from the hantavirus, and a few other cases were confirmed.

However, there were no symptomatic passengers on board as the ship prepared for disembarkation, according to Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization.

“Spain’s authorities have prepared a careful, step-by-step plan: passengers will be ferried ashore at the industrial port of Granadilla, far from residential areas, in sealed, guarded vehicles, through a completely cordoned-off corridor, and repatriated directly to their home countries,” Dr. Tedros said.

The cruise carrying 86 passengers and 61 crew members from 23 countries departed from Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1 and stopped at several remote locations as it traveled across the South Atlantic Ocean.

The Trump administration withdrew from the World Health Organization, but the CDC has remained in contact with the organization to coordinate its hantavirus response.

However, the CDC has drawn criticism over its preparedness for an outbreak.

The hantavirus outbreak is “a sentinel event” that speaks to “how well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I’m very sorry to say that we are not prepared,” Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told The Associated Press.

Dr. Bhattacharya said the CDC has “been working night and day to stay on top of this” and keep Americans safe without causing unnecessary alarm.

“You want to meet to moderate the response to the actual epidemiological threat, and so that’s what we did with this hantavirus threat,” he said. “If the threat level were higher than we would have obviously reacted differently.”

Dr. Bhattacharya posted last week on social media that the CDC began coordinating with domestic and international partners as soon as it was notified of the hantavirus situation and worked with the State Department to provide health guidance to American passengers of the MV Hondius.

“Hantavirus is not spread by people without symptoms, transmission requires close contact, and the risk to the American public is very low,” he said. “CDC has the world’s leading experts on hantavirus and is lending its technical expertise when coordinating with interagency partners, state health offices, and international authorities on response and repatriation planning.”

U.S. health officials were deployed to the Canary Islands to meet the Americans disembarking the ship. The plan is to transport them to a University of Nebraska quarantine center for evaluation and monitoring.

• This article is based on wire service reports.