The acting head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on May 10 that a hantavirus outbreak on a Dutch cruise ship “is not COVID,” suggesting that the virus, which normally spreads via rodents, won’t cause a pandemic.
“The key message I want to send to your audience is that this is not COVID, this is not going to have—lead to the kind of outbreak,” acting CDC Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told CNN’s “State of the Union” in response to a question about the hantavirus.
Bhattacharya said that the CDC and U.S. health officials “don’t want to treat it like COVID.”
“We don’t want to cause a public panic over this,” he said.
“We want to treat it with the hantavirus protocols … that, again, were successful in containing outbreaks in the past.”
Bhattacharya said that hantavirus is “very difficult” to contract and that person-to-person transmission is rare.
“But there are concerns,” he said. “And what I’m hearing from health officials, public health officials, is less about what is going on with hantavirus and more about what this might—how this might bode for a more serious outbreak.”
The virus is usually spread by rodents such as mice or rats, but it can be transmitted person-to-person in rare cases as a result of close contact.
The virus was found in South Africa on May 2 by authorities who were treating a UK national who had become sick, weeks after another passenger of the Dutch cruise ship, the MV Hondius, died during a hantavirus outbreak on the ship.
On May 10, groups of passengers and crew disembarked from the MV Hondius to be evacuated to their home countries, where they will isolate according to national protocols to prevent further spread of the disease. Government planes carrying Spanish and French nationals landed in Madrid and Paris, respectively, on the afternoon of May 10, officials said.
One of the five French passengers had shown symptoms during the flight, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu wrote in a post on X on May 10.
“Five of our compatriots present on the MV Hondius, a hotbed of Hantavirus infection, have been repatriated to national territory,” he wrote. “One of them exhibited symptoms on the repatriation flight. As a result, these five passengers were immediately placed in strict isolation until further notice. They are receiving medical care and will undergo testing and a full health assessment.”
The World Health Organization has recommended a 42-day quarantine for all passengers from the cruise ship, Maria Van Kerkhove, its director of epidemic and pandemic management, said in a briefing.
Bhattacharya told the outlet on May 10 that 17 American passengers from the cruise ship would be given the choice of isolating at home or at a facility in Nebraska, depending on their circumstances.
On May 9, the New Jersey Department of Health said that two residents of the state were on a flight with a person believed to have hantavirus, although few details about the two people were provided. The department said that the residents were traveling on a flight abroad.
Last week, Van Kerkhove echoed similar sentiments about hantavirus, saying that the virus is not the “next COVID,” while noting that it can be deadly in some cases.
Reuters contributed to this report.