A Canadian isolating in B.C. has presumptively tested positive for hantavirus after leaving the cruise ship affected by an outbreak of the Andes strain in recent weeks, B.C.'s top doctor said Saturday.

Dr. Bonnie Henry, provincial health officer, said Saturday the patient started to develop mild symptoms, including fever and headache, two days ago. The individual was taken to hospital in Victoria, and assessed and tested there.

The BC Centre for Disease Control confirmed a presumptive positive test result on Friday. It will need to be confirmed by a microbiology lab in Winnipeg. The person is still in hospital in isolation and considered stable. [...]

Please hantavirus can't be another global pandemic no more vaccines or lockdowns 😔 please no more divisions and conflict among people's I swear politics school society everything got worse since the covid lockdowns and I don't want to live in a worse world. 😭 Please I hope hantavirus is not gonna become another pandemic and cause more hate and I don't want to be locked in again like a prisoner

The CDC is having people isolating in their homes wear a respirator if they are near others in the house. Also and most importantly they say a health department worker will come to the house twice a day in person to check on them. This is crucial and actually allows the initial rise in temperature which is believed to be the most contagious time to be caught before household members are exposed. This is a huge change from the scouts honor of taking one's own temperature and not wearing a respirator when out of the room.

https://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/php/emergency-guidance/index.html#:~:text=Coordinate%20any%20urgent%20or%20necessary,home%20and%20away%20from%20others

General precautions

Health departments should advise all individuals with high-risk exposure to modify their activities during the monitoring period to protect their household members and communities as follows:

• Practice good hand hygiene
• Ensure good ventilation
• Wear a respirator or well-fitting mask that covers the mouth and nose, if indoors with others
• Maintain distance
  • Avoid kissing, hugging, or other intimate contact
  • Avoid sharing a bedroom with anyone
• Avoid exposing others to bodily fluids
  • Avoid sharing items that may be contaminated (e.g., toothbrushes, cigarettes/vapes/hookah, or unwashed towels, bedding, or clothing, etc.)
  • Avoid sharing food out of the same plate or bowl, eating from the same utensil, or sharing beverages
• Delay nonessential medical or dental appointments
  • Coordinate any urgent or necessary care with the health department in advance and notify the healthcare facility

Monitoring

• Monitoring by the health department should occur twice daily, in person

Looks like the Andes Hantavirus is getting ready to party down.

I wish everyone would stop making predictions about how this is going to go. We don’t know how this is going to go. A lot of us — including me — think everything is basically going to be okay from here on out, and that death and suffering will be limited. Yet a lot of us (including me) were DEAD WRONG on SARS-CoV2/COVID. So it’s fine if people say why they think everything will probably be okay, but a little uncertainty and humility would honestly be both more human AND more scientific.

I have been very concerned about global warming for decades but I NEVER thought modern scientific civilization would have a major deadly pandemic until I was sitting in my apartment in NYC day after day in March/April 2020 hearing the city silent besides ambulances while each day the death toll in the city rose by the 100s or 1000s until after 45 days into the pandemic there were 20,000 people dead of SARS-CoV2/COVID in NYC. My microbiologist spouse knew better, of course, LOL.

And I don’t want to hear ”there is no risk to the public.” What I want to hear is that the precautionary principle is being diligently followed in order to track, trace, test, monitor, isolate, quarantine as strictly as possible in order to nip any possibility of a larger outbreak in the bud. Getting the details of that is nice, if it’s possible, but just getting told over and over that that is happening and we will get through this is also fine.

LOL Andrew Cuomo is a bad guy in many, many ways but goddamn some of his daily televised/live-streamed video press conferences during the worst of the COVID pandemic and the lockdowns were friggin’ amazing and so reassuring at times. And he didn’t tell us “there is no risk to the public.” It may just be ”communications” but it matters.

The 2026 MV Hondius cruise ship outbreak represents a terrifying milestone in global epidemiology. As the first known shipborne Andes virus event in recorded history, the outbreak has already claimed three lives and scattered a highly lethal pathogen across multiple countries.

Hantaviruses belong to a family of RNA viruses that are naturally maintained and carried by wild rodents. While most hantaviruses are transmitted exclusively from animals to humans, the Andes strain is uniquely dangerous because it is the only hantavirus in the world with documented person-to-person transmission capabilities. This distinct biological property transforms the virus from a localized ecological hazard into a pathogen with profound global reach.

In late April 2026, a federal grand jury unsealed an indictment against Dr. David M. Morens, the former senior adviser to Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The charges, which include five counts spanning conspiracy, destruction and falsification of federal records, and aiding and abetting, carry a theoretical maximum sentence of 51 years in prison.

The indictment of David Morens and the hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius are not coincidental juxtapositions. They are expressions of the same underlying crisis or the systematic subordination of public health to the imperatives of geopolitical aggression, domestic political repression and the defense of private profit. Understanding this connection is the starting point for any serious political response.

Since it’s sounding like this is airborne and has a much higher CFR than COVID, what do we think the likelihood is of a return to broad-based, population-level social distancing?