Passengers test positive as hantavirus response criticized

Authorities are tracing more than 90 passengers exposed to hantavirus who disembarked from the cruise ship hit by a deadly outbreak, two of whom already tested positive.

The World Health Organization recommends a 42-day quarantine after exposure to the virus, which usually spreads via rodent feces but sometimes human-to-human, because symptoms can be slow to appear. But dozens of passengers left the ship without being tested.

A widespread outbreak is unlikely, but the official response has been “incompetent,” the science writer Kelsey Piper argued.

Even if there is only a one-in-100 chance that this leads to a pandemic, one-in-100 events happen, and if this is the response then we are “doomed to, eventually, get an unlucky roll.”