Show notes
A weird virus has popped up on a cruise ship, and it’s making a bunch of us nervous. It’s a type of hantavirus called Andes virus, and scientists think that it’s infected almost a dozen people so far — three of them have died. And now people are getting off the boat, some of them going into government quarantine, but some of them traveling home. And people are like, wait … this all sounds VERY familiar … from the early days of Covid.
Highlighted moments
Andes virus is the only Hantavirus that we know of that spreads from one person to the next.
“If you enter this phase and you really don't seek medical attention, you have over a 50% chance of mortality, and you can die within 24 hours.”
“They looked at the Andes virus that circulated in 2018 in this outbreak, and they compared it to another outbreak that had been documented in 1996, so 22 years previously. And the sequences are virtually the same.”
“I think even in the most, sort of the most dramatic outbreaks we have, the R0 is something like two for hantavirus. And if you do any quarantining at all, it drops below one.”
Transcript
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