Comment on How worried should we be about hantavirus right now?
usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 6 days agoStarting this off with: I am not an epidemiologist and most of the epidemiologist I’m seeing online aren’t yet too concerned
That being said, they have not found any rodents on the ship, though that does not mean they didn’t just them in their search. The version on the ship has been confirmed to be the Andes Virus (ANDV) which is human-to-human transmissible in a way that most hantavirus are not
It’s hard to say exactly how the virus will behave outside of a cruise ship (which are known for spreading diseases more than other locations), but we can potentially look at a past outbreak in 2018 in a small town for an idea
In this work, we described the isolation of the strain responsible for the largest ANDV PTP transmission outbreak, which occurred in the small town of Epuyén and began on November 2, 2018. This strain, ARG-Epuyén, exhibited a high capacity for PTP transmission, necessitating the implementation of quarantine measures to curtail further spread [8]. The median reproductive number (the mean number of secondary cases caused by an infected person) was 2.12 before control measures were implemented and subsequently dropped to below 1.0 by late January