Leah Feiger

Yeah, maybe I should get this $300 kit.

That's going to do it.

Like, I already have, you know, asthma.

Like, I can't take anything else.

And that's, like, so upsetting to watch happen.

happen?

Because it's like people, everyday folks who are just being taken in by this.

Exactly.

It's

Really, really cool reporting.

Lots of love to public health officials here who absolutely just, like, raced to make this happen.

Kind of wild.

As passengers were returning, like, from this cruise that saw the hantavirus outbreak of this Andes strain that, like, can pass human to human as opposed to, like, via...

this rodent transmission, there wasn't really a test yet to be able to figure out the earliest stages of infection, like what this actually meant for people coming back, which is very difficult if you have all of these passengers returning and you can't tell them for certain if they have it.

But in just a couple of days, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which is where in Nebraska people were getting received, a lab developed its own diagnostic test for the Andes virus ahead of receiving all of these passengers.

really, really cool.

Peter Iwen, the director of the Nebraska Public Health Lab, told Emily that they think that they're actually the only lab in the nation that has this test available at the moment.

The fact that they spun it together so quickly is really just absolutely incredible.

And specifically that it's able to detect very, very small quantities of the virus before people have full-blown symptoms.

And that's been part of the issue so far is that like all of a sudden people were just like,