YOU'RE DOING IT AGAIN
- May 7
- 4 min read
Updated: May 11
WHAT ARE WE SEEING?
I’m watching doctors, nurses, and epidemiologists, as well as science communicators and folks in the news business, offer flatly wrong, wildly misleading, or just seriously outdated information about hantavirus and the outbreak cluster they are struggling to contain. This is really the vast majority of all the medical professionals I can find, particularly those invited on the news. So many, certainly all serious professionals responding seriously, are not even up to date or aligned with the most basic public information sheet from the CDC "About Hantavirus", for example, or with what the WHO was telling us about this specific situation, even three days ago now. It's disgusting. It's especially bad because effectively all of this communication travesty could be mitigated just by clearly citing specific, long-standing, high-quality sources, of which there are plenty.
These people are taking to social media in their capacity as medical professionals, public health experts, and those charged with informing the public largely to comfort people that the situation is nothing to worry about or at least not yet a serious concern. To do so they’re recording and sharing videos of themselves, on public record, telling people the virus only transmits via rat waste, knowing this is untrue. They’re telling us the virus has an incubation period of just a few weeks, rather than up to eight. They’re either seriously overstating or otherwise understating the lethality and transmissibility of the virus in question rather than just spelling out the evidence as it exists. (To be clear: the median reproductive rate in the studies we have is 2, so not unlike the flu or COVID, meaning highly transmissible; and the Case Fatality Rate in the contained outbreak from 2018, the best investigated case we have, was above 30%; so, in all — with asymptomatic, airborne spread and no vaccine or treatments of any kind — this thing looks, if only to me, far more like Ebola than the flu.) They’re claiming the outbreak is contained to the ship, knowing it never was. They’re offering that there are only a dozen people who left the ship when it has been reported and confirmed the number is closer to 30 or 40, but still unknown. And they're pretending we know any of this because of the good work of the WHO and other medical authorities despite it being clear that the only reason the public knows anything is that a Spanish cruise ship passenger reported the situation to his local media. They’re telling the public there are people being watched but no suspected or confirmed cases among those dozens of people who boarded regular flights and flew home, doubtless over many hours while packed in with a hundred (200?) or more other passengers and perhaps on multiple 10 or 15 hour flights, and to every continent but Antarctica. And, weirdly, they’re either ignorant of the confirmed cases outside of the passenger population or pretending they don't exist. They're telling us spread requires "close contact" (and, of course, doing so without defining what that means) all while we have prior investigations of this Andes strain, an airborne, person-to-person variant, telling us no direct, close, or even sustained contact is necessary for transmission; and they're doing this despite the CDC recommending airborne precautions...
Yes, we're doing this again. ("This" = Having the information we need, and that being freely available to all and legible to an attentive seventh grader, and yet still failing to communicate this all while getting everything critical flatly wrong.) And, yes, you're welcome to suspect that all the data we have to date is flawed or full of fatal errors but you don't have better data; so until those tests and studies emerge to correct the record and upgrade our understanding we've got what we've got — which we are not currently using.
WHAT HAPPENED?
Knowing the above and what you may have heard, here's a firsthand account of what went down on the ship, published by ITV on May 7th, just so you can be sure nothing is as it is being presented:
"We were told by the captain that the passenger had died because of natural causes and we are not in danger of any contagious disease..."
The body of the deceased Dutch national stayed on board of the ship for another 12 days until it docked in St Helena.
The deceased man was travelling with his wife, who during that time, was being comforted - in close proximity - by other passengers.
“All of the other passengers were giving her hugs and everyone was talking to her.
“At every meal, someone else was sitting beside her and we had open buffets, we had group activities, lecture sessions, we had meetings in lounge area.
“On a ship like Hondius, there isn't much to do other than socialising.”
Ruhi was part of the group that disembarked at St Helena on 24th April, along with the deceased man’s wife.
By that time, she too had started to show symptoms of Hantavirus.
“She was struggling to stand, she was looking really ill.
“We thought that she was just having a very deep grief, but in fact she had the virus.“
From St Helena, Ruhi and the rest of the group -including the infected Dutch woman - travelled together on a flight to Johannesburg, where the woman later died.
And so we're only two weeks since these passengers had close, intimate interactions with the deceased and then boarded planes with dozens or hundreds of other passengers for hours as they traversed the globe. And all of those folks are now being told by their own and international public health experts and medical professionals that, effectively, they cannot catch or spread the illness... A complete and total gong show.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
If you want to know something about this situation and hantavirus go look at a pair of studies:
One is an investigation of the last major outbreak in 2018-19:
by Martínez et al and published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020.
And the other a look at the virus and past outbreaks (with good links to other research):
by Coelho et al and published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases in 2025
UPDATE: May 11, 2026
This video perfectly spells out my experience with this to this point.
