'Serious disease': Hantavirus less infectious than COVID, yet has significant fatality rate - 1 in 3
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
Annette Young is pleased to welcome Matt Mc Kee, a professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. As health authorities race to contain an emerging cluster of hantavirus infections, Mc Kee offers a measured but sobering assessment of the risks, and the lessons the world should have learned from COVID. He warns that hantavirus is “a serious disease” with “a fatality rate of about one in three,” Mc Kee is careful to distinguish it from the coronavirus pandemic, stressing that “it does not spread at anything like the rate that COVID does.” Yet he warns that an unusually specific chain of exposure, from rodent-contaminated landfill sites to what he calls “an institutional amplifier”, aboard a confined vessel, created “a very unusual set of circumstances” for transmission.