Dr Luke O'Neill

Now, the funny one here, Pat, is one of the hantaviruses, it's called Andes, because that can spread between humans.

It's the only one that spreads between humans.

And pretty quickly, they identified it as the Andes virus.

strain of hantavirus.

And that was done probably a day into this.

Yeah, it was good to be cautious initially because maybe it had changed in some way and was more infectious and dangerous.

But pretty quickly they realised, now this has been around for decades, it's endemic in South America, this particular hanty strain, you know.

But it does jump between humans.

Now, very importantly, it's very hard to catch off another human.

It looks like it was a couple who shared a cabin, infected each other.

And the doctor got infected, put on the ship, because he was obviously caring for these people.

Now, he hasn't died.

There's a strange feature of this as well.

It takes weeks to emerge.

You pick up the rat droppings.

You inhale them is the main way by the way.

You inhale an aerosol from rat droppings, right?

And then it's in your body.

But the symptoms don't start for maybe two, three, four weeks later.

We'd love to know why that is.