Wendy Zuckerman

Michelle, who's our doctor from New Mexico, who's seen how devastating hunter viruses can be, and she lives in a place where the rodents can be infected with hunter virus and people every now and then get infected.

So Michelle Dang, our producer, asked her,

But the broader point is that even though there's a lot of mice scurrying around New Mexico carrying this virus, pooing and weeing all over the place, and around 2 million people live there, doctors diagnose fewer than 10 cases a year.

Anne, our virologist, told us that there might be something else working in our favour here too.

Although we mentioned before the break that hantavirus can have this long incubation period where you can have two months between getting infected and showing symptoms, which, yes, is a long time.

Even Anne said... This is crazy to me.

But she also said that unlike COVID...

it's not clear that you can actually spread the disease during that time.

This version of Hantavirus that led to the relatively small outbreak on the cruise ship, it's been known to science since 1996, 30 years ago, when Macarena was number one on the charts.

And in that time, three decades, it really hasn't mutated, particularly when you compare it to viruses that have caused pandemics.

So put it all together.

This virus does not spread easily between people, which is why when an odd outbreak has happened before, it doesn't tend to blow up.

And so far, this virus hasn't been mutating to become better at transmitting between people.

So when we asked Anne the big question of this episode, the question that so many of you guys had,

is this going to be the next pandemic?

Here's what she said.

And other researchers that we spoke to said the same thing.

And I know you might be feeling, hey, some of you scientists said COVID would be fine too, and look what happened.

And at the beginning of the pandemic, scientists were making educated guesses about what was going on and how the virus was going to behave, and they got stuff wrong.

With this hunter virus that's causing the outbreak, the Andes version, scientists have been studying it for 30 years.