Wendy Zuckerman

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.

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.