British passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship where the hantavirus outbreak first occurred will finish their isolation periods next Monday. This is a public health success story worth celebrating, because so many worse results were possible. We heard so much about what went wrong during Covid and the various systems that failed, so it’s good to recognise when things go right – even if you won’t hear about it in the evening news.
There were 147 passengers and crew, and on 4 May seven cases of respiratory illness on board were identified as the Andes strain of hantavirus, which has been known to spread from human to human. This was already an extremely unlucky outcome – hantavirus is deadly, with death rates approaching 30% based on recent research, but most strains only spread from animals to humans.
