“This is not COVID. This is not influenza. It spreads in a very, very different way,” Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s acting director of epidemiology and pandemic management, stressed at a press briefing on Thursday.
Michael Marks, an infectious disease expert and professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said in a statement Thursday that given the nature of this virus and the precautions and surveillance already in place, “the risk of widespread transmission to the general population is extremely low.”
The comments echo a reassuring risk assessment from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control on Wednesday, which detailed that even if the disease spread from passengers evacuated from the ship, the virus “is not easily transmitted, so it is unlikely that if infection prevention and control measures are implemented, it will lead to many cases in the community or a widespread outbreak.”
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also considered the risk to the American public “extremely low” in a brief statement Wednesday evening.
So why are infectious disease experts and health officials so confident that this will not turn into another global health crisis?
Here’s what we know about this virus and its outbreak
hantavirus
The virus spreading on the ship is a member of the large hantavirus family, which is widespread around the world. These are enveloped, negative-strand RNA viruses whose genome consists of three segments.
The so-called Old World hantaviruses (including Hantaan, Seoul, Pumala, and Dobrava-Belgrade) are found in Africa, Asia, and Europe, with centers of activity in China, Korea, Russia, and some European countries. The first awareness of these viruses occurred in the 1950s, when the disease was discovered in soldiers fighting in the Korean War. These viruses cause hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS), a disease marked by fever, bleeding, and kidney damage. Depending on the specific hantavirus strain involved, the mortality rate ranges from approximately 1-15 percent.
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