Wendy Zuckerman

I guess that is what deep kissing is at the heart of it.

Other risk factors in that study were sleeping in the same bed, having sex and being exposed to semen.

And on this point, we found another study from 2023 that tracked a 55-year-old man who got infected with the Andes virus and later recovered.

But get this, almost six years later, traces of the virus could still be found in his semen.

So remember the R-naught from the height of the COVID pandemic.

This is basically the number that scientists calculate to say if you get disease X, how many susceptible people will you pass it on to on average?

And for some diseases, this is super high, like measles.

famous for being incredibly contagious if you're not vaccinated.

It's estimated that if you get it, you could give it to 12 to 18 other people.

This might be partly because hantavirus doesn't seem to hang around in your nose, throat, and lungs in the same way that COVID and influenza does.

You know, where a big breath could push out a bunch of viral particles into the air and, you know, maybe infect the person you're talking to.

Instead, Hantavirus likes to stick around deeper in the cells of our lungs because it really likes those endothelial cells inside our blood vessels.

And the fact that this type of hunter virus doesn't spread that easily from person to person is probably why the largest outbreaks that we've had of it have gotten just a few dozen people sick.

Even with this cruise ship outbreak, so far at least, it's hardly gone bananas.

In over a month, so far we've had about a dozen people infected...

Now, in this outbreak, it's worth pointing out that while there were early reports that a woman got infected after just sitting on a plane near someone who was on the cruise ship and later died of Hantavirus, it now looks like that's not true.

The woman on the flight later tested negative.

So here's where we are at.

Hantavirus, when you compare it to other scary and contagious viruses, it does not spread easily from person to person.

But also, your chance of getting a nasty case of hunter virus from a rodent is also pretty low.