Emily Mullen

And in the early days of these symptoms, this looks like really any other respiratory virus.

So you can have fever, muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness, but then the disease progresses

to some pretty serious stuff, which includes coughing, shortness of breath and difficulty breathing.

So as of Wednesday, two patients with hantavirus and one suspected of being infected are being evacuated from the ship and are on their way to Europe for treatment.

We also know that a man who returned to his home in Switzerland from a trip to South America who traveled on the same cruise ship, he has tested positive for the virus and is receiving treatment

in a hospital in Switzerland.

The patient's wife did travel with him on the trip.

She has not yet shown any symptoms, but she is self-isolating as a precaution.

And so now Swiss public health officials are working to trace people that this person might have come into contact with.

No, I think you're right.

The hantavirus expert I spoke with said there have been past clusters of the anti-strain before, but not big outbreaks.

And these clusters have tended to involve prolonged close contact with people suffering from the disease.

This is a virus that does not spread nearly as efficiently as other respiratory viruses that we're used to, like COVID or flu, for instance.

Hantavirus symptoms are also typically pretty severe.

So this is not a virus, again, like COVID, where lots of people are going around infected with the disease, spreading it asymptomatically without knowing about it.

So that's at least a little bit of comfort, even though the flip side of that is that the disease is quite severe.

So the World Health Organization says the risk to the general public is currently low, and this is probably not another COVID situation.

That was me editorializing that World Health Organization did not include the probably.

Okay.

I think even if you are planning on taking a vacation on a cruise ship, if you've got a cruise booked for this summer, I think there are probably other things to worry about, like norovirus.