There has been plenty of news coverage in the past week about the Dutch research vessel that saw passengers infected with the Andes strain of the hantavirus. Eleven confirmed cases on board have been recorded, with three deaths resulting from the virus. This has become fodder for hype in the news; the prospect of another global outbreak is just too much to resist, and NBC News is here to lead the charge.
The people on board were traveling from Antarctica, with frequent stops en route to Europe. One passenger has been tabbed as the initial carrier. This man, an ornithologist, was studying birds during one excursion, and it is believed he contracted the virus while tracking fowl in an Argentinian landfill. Small wonder how he became Patient-Zero; it would have been challenging enough to have the cabin beside him after his romp through a South American garage dump.
READ MORE: You Won’t Believe How a Simple Birdwatching Stop Created the Hantavirus Outbreak
The ship has reached port, and the passengers have been quarantined. NBC News is all excitable because there are as many as 18 Americans who were on board the “S.S. Contagion,” and you can almost imagine the alarms going off in the network’s offices at Pandemic Control.
It has been assumed that hantavirus is contagious only if someone is in close contact with someone who’s having symptoms. Some experts now suggest it’s possible it may be more contagious than thought. https://t.co/IuZVsniv9d
— NBC News (@NBCNews) May 12, 2026
They are clearly giddy, as indicated in the headline: How easily does the Andes hantavirus spread? What to know after cruise ship outbreak
The latest confirmed cases are all among people who had direct contact with other patients who were on the ship, although concerns about how easily — or not — the Andes strain spreads are growing. Andes is the only type of hantavirus that can pass from person to person.
Get those bulk order cases of masks and gallon jugs of sanitizer out of your prepper storage! We are facing a reboot of “The Walking Dead”!
“What we’re hearing now, including from the doctors who were on the ship, is that at least a few people contracted it without that long, prolonged exposure that we’ve always assumed,” Dr. Ashish Jha, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, told NBC’s “TODAY” show on Monday.
Great, and just when everyone was getting back to working at the office. “Honey! Clear out all your scrapbooking crap from the den – I need to set up the home office again!”
In a well-documented “superspreader” outbreak of the Andes virus, in Epuyén, Argentina, three people with symptoms who attended crowded social events, including a birthday party, ultimately led to 34 cases, with 11 deaths. Researchers were able to piece together how an infected person might have spread the virus at the birthday party. In one instance, the infected person spread the virus to somebody at a table roughly 1 to 2 meters away. Another infection most likely happened when the infected person simply said hello to another person as they crossed paths. The distance between the two was not known.
Okay, allow me to stick a pin in this hype (not a hypodermic needle). This Andes hantavirus strain is rare, and it is not easily transmissible. It is not an airborne virus but needs to be passed in close, possibly extended proximity with others. That alone should tamp down the hysteria.
Those 18 Americans are back stateside and have been sequestered for monitoring. As NBC News is forced to admit, “at least three are being closely watched for possible infection.” So there are precisely zero confirmed cases of Andes hantavirus in the U.S. That did not stop NBC from speaking to no fewer than four medical experts about the virus, in the hopes of an outbreak becoming imminent.
And for the most part, those doctors gave them deflated news. It is not easy to contract this virus, and even harder to pass it. There are no recorded cases currently in this country. This entire event should rate little more than a capsule paragraph, not an extensive exploration in the hopes of finding the next global scourge.
That said, I will take some of the necessary precautions and place NBC News into quarantine and keep this outlet shut down. The last thing we need is another outbreak of needless restrictions, useless masking, and enduring the wave of screeching Karens in store aisles. We have already survived that apocalypse in this country.
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