Sanjay Gupta

Health authorities are reporting this information after sequencing the virus from some of those that have been infected.

So the short answer is no.

And there's sort of three primary reasons that scientists talk about this being low risk.

One is something known as the reproductive number.

That means if someone has it, how many people are they likely to spread it to in the future?

And with this, if you look at the overall average during outbreaks, it's about 1.19%.

Okay, 1.19.

When COVID was at its peak transmission, the numbers were somewhere between 2 and 4, so more than double that.

So that's one reason they don't expect this to be something that's going to become widespread.

Second of all...

We know that people can only transmit this virus during a very short infectious window, and that is typically when they are sick, really sick, and that's typically one to two days.

Keep in mind, again, with COVID, people could spread that virus even before they developed symptoms.

And then third of all, I think it's really important is that this virus, this Andes virus, its genome was first sequenced back in 1996.

And when they compare that genome sequencing to 2018 and then again to 2026, it really hasn't changed much.

It's a pretty stable genome.

Remember again with COVID, all those variants, it was mutating near constantly, especially in that first year.

Now, I will say that what makes this a little bit tricky is that the Andes virus does have a long incubation period.

That means the time between exposure to the virus and the time someone might get sick, if they're going to get sick, is typically 14 to 17 days.

But...

It can be as long as eight weeks.