Very soon after this post the other day:
I was accused by a couple of individuals on social media of being “dramatic”, and of “scaremongering”.
They took exception to my view that – coming from Argentina – this particular strain of Hantavirus (at that point only isolated in one patient, and not the other two seriously ill patients or the three individuals who died, including the one that collapsed in OR Tambo airport) could well have been passed from human to human.
But then a day later, the WHO agreed with me:
The World Health Organization says there may have been rare human-to-human transmission of hantavirus on the Dutch cruise ship where three passengers have died.
The virus is usually spread from rodents, but the WHO said in this instance it could have spread among “really close contacts” aboard the MV Hondius vessel.
And today, our local NICD confirmed that:
And sure, that still doesn’t mean that we’re in any huge amount of danger from Hantavirus, but equally, it doesn’t mean that we’re in the clear, either.
Thankfully, there finally seems to have been some hard work done in contact tracing those on board the flight with the Dutch woman – which was almost certainly 4Z132 on April 25th:
Now we just need to know what she did (aside from collapsing) between this flight landing at 20:31 and her not getting onto KL592, which departed at 23:58 that evening.
That’s two confirmed cases so far, then. And it would be foolish not to assume that her husband also died from the virus. Given this new development of potential human to human transmission, they’re also going to medivac another close contact of his off the ship today.
Important work again by the NICD is confirming the strain of Hantavirus, and good that we’re now able to look at the outbreak and potential consequences with fresh information. But I’m still sticking to the way that I ended that last post on this subject:
It’s going to be interesting couple of weeks ahead.