WHO says hantavirus outbreak differs from Covid pandemic

No need to panic about hantavirus was the overriding message from the World Health Organization (WHO) at its briefing on Thursday.

This is an outbreak of a rare virus, WHO officials said, on a cruise ship, with so far just five confirmed cases among a total of eight suspected. It is definitely not comparable to Covid, they insisted.

That virus was brand new, while hantavirus, and this specific Andes strain, is known to epidemiologists. But to ordinary people, still scarred by the experience of the Covid pandemic, the headlines over hantavirus are unsettling.

While the WHO tried hard to reassure, there are some unanswered questions, in particular about the tracing of people who may have been in contact with anyone on the ship.

We know a number of passengers left the cruise ship at St Helena, and returned home. One of them, a Swiss man, is now in hospital with hantavirus, but did not become ill until he was back home.

Are all the passengers on the flights he must have taken being traced? What about the other passengers, from a dozen different countries, who also left the ship early?

Here the WHO did not provide clear answers, though officials suggested they would be publishing guidelines for retrospective tracing and testing in the next few hours. They do expect more cases, but reiterated the risk to the general public is low.