Emily Abdollah

And so in some parts of the world, that's more men than women who are in sheds and barns and sweeping things up.

Okay.

The WHO started releasing some information about the timing of symptom onset.

And what's really interesting to me is that the first patient who fell ill had been traveling in South America, including in Argentina, before the ship left on April 1st.

The first report of symptoms in that person was on the 6th of April.

Now, most cases of hantavirus that I've heard about and what they report in the medical literature is that the incubation period from the time you're exposed to the infectious disease until you manifest symptoms is usually...

one to six to eight weeks for hantavirus so this person got on the ship on the first yeah and had symptoms at least by the sixth and that's really fast but it's just at the razor's edge and even a little sooner where one starts to wonder that this person was exposed before they got on the ship

And then this person unfortunately passed away shortly after the onset of their severe symptoms on the 11th of April.

The next person, who, as I understand, was a very close contact, and I think if you look in some reports, the spouse of the person who passed away on the ship, the second person was first reported to have symptoms on April 24th.

So that is several weeks later.

after the onset of symptoms of the first person.

And in my reading of these cases of human-to-human spread, it's often when the person is symptomatic that they have been shown to transmit to other people.

So given that gap and that timeline, and then the others who have fallen ill, it's been, from what I understand what's been reported,

mostly around the 24th or the 28th of April.

That's a several-week jump from when the first person developed symptoms on the 6th of April.

And I think you're seeing that possibility play out in how they're responding in terms of the public health interventions.

Contact tracing, isolation, quarantining.

So I think part of the question about more cases is not just the possibility of human-to-human spread, but I think it still remains a possibility that there was some exposure on the ship to animals or rodents.

It could be both.

or to some commonplace folks stayed prior to getting on the ship.