The acting head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday that a hantavirus outbreak on a Dutch cruise ship "is not COVID," suggesting the virus that 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 Jay Bhattacharya told CNN's "State of the Union" in response to a question about the hantavirus.
Bhattacharya added that the CDC and U.S. health officials "don't want to treat it like COVID," adding that "we don't want to cause a public panic over this."
"We want to treat it with the hantavirus protocols ... that, again, were successful in containing outbreaks in the past," he said.
Elaborating, Bhattacharya said that hantavirus is "very difficult" to contract and that person-to-person transmission is rare.
"But there are concerns," he added. "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, had died during a hantavirus outbreak on the ship.
On Sunday, 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 Sunday afternoon, officials said.
One of the five French passengers had shown symptoms during the flight, wrote French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu in a post on X Sunday.
"Five of our compatriots present on the MV Hondius, a hotbed of Hantavirus infection, have been repatriated to national territory. One of them exhibited symptoms on the repatriation flight," he wrote in a post. "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 (WHO) has recommended a 42-day quarantine for all passengers from the cruise ship from Sunday, Maria Van Kerkhove, its director of epidemic and pandemic management, said in a briefing.
Bhattacharya told the outlet Sunday 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.
