Title. Apparently there is a cruise ship quarantined right now because of this. And a guy at work was telling me some of the staff escaped? Not sure what exactly is going on but is it cause for concern?
Buy the toilet paper now before the shelves are empty.
In France, it was red wine and condoms. But you do you.
I don’t need condoms for the same reason I need twice as much toilet paper. I could still go for the wine but it makes the whole experience kind of sad.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
“Some free advice? You ever get back there, you hoard toilet paper. You understand me? Hoard it. Hoard it like it’s made of gold. 'Cause it is.” (Chuck Shurley, Supernatural TV series, S05E04)
This gives me flashbacks. I close my eyes and I see empty toilet paper shelves. The horror
Whats weird is, unrelated to the pandemic, I always buy the massive pack of toilet paper. I think it’s like 28 rolls. And I had bought that JUST before all the panic. It’s just how I naturally do this. Buy the big one, and like a year later it runs out.
Then the panic starts, and my mom calls, and says “I was out shopping and picked you up some toilet paper, in case you need it!”
“Oh, I’m good. I just bought some.”
“Just take the damn toilet paper! These shelfs are empty! You don’t know when you’ll get some!”
Gives me ANOTHER of the same size I just bought.
Then my dad calls.
“Hey, I know you sometimes have trouble finding time to go grocery shopping, so I got you some toilet paper. These stores are going crazy!”
“Oh, no no. I have more then enough.”
“I already bought it, and I don’t think you can return toilet paper.”
Gives me a 16 roll pack.
Then my sister calls.
“Heeeeeey, I was out at Costco earlier, and these stores are running out of toilet paper. Luckily I got each of us a 60 roll pack.”
“Nooooooo…I have so much as it is! Mom AND dad gave me a bunch.”
“Well I don’t have room in my house for all this! I got one for you, and one for (other sister), and one for mom!”
gives me 60 more rolls
Then my other sister calls.
“Heeeeey, so (first sister) got me 60 rolls of toilet paper. I don’t like the costco brand. So I’m giving it to you.”
"You know she already got me one, rigUS #+ “Well I don’t like it. So now its yours.”
gives me ANOTHER 60 rolls
Then my aunt called.
“Hey do you need toilet paper?”
“NO!”
“Geez, don’t get mad at me! I’m just helping you out. Take this, and only use it for emergancies.”
gives me a 4 roll pack
I still have a decent amount of toilet paper. Both 60 packs remain unopened. I haven’t looked in that closet to see exactly where I am, but I think I’m at like 60% unused.
I’m not sure whether I’m envious of your familial connections or glad I avoided similar ones.
Bruh, your family is the reason it got emptied 😂
Since there are comments saying that the hantavirus rarely spreads from human-to-human, it seems like the news hasn’t spread fast enough…
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/hondius-ship-hantavirus-andes-strain-9.7189281
Hantavirus is spread by rodents and, more rarely, people. To date, the Andes strain is the only type of hantavirus in which human-to-human transmission has been confirmed, usually through close contact, such as by sharing a bed or food, experts say.
Article title: WHO confirms Andes strain hantavirus on cruise ship passengers, with 3 transferring from ship for treatment
…
And just 13 minutes ago, this news came out: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/hantavirus-outbreak-cruise-ship-9.7190707; Contract tracing is underway.
Still rare.
Not saying it isn’t. Just saying we’ve essentially hit the proverbial jackpot. Not a jackpot we like, but a jackpot nonetheless.
I have read a lot about it because I have stressed a lot about it, I’m also naturally very skeptical so I dig down a lot.
This particular variant is the Andes strain of the virus which have been show to transmit human.
It’s a virus that had existed for long time. And has already caused local epidemics. The most famous the Chilean Argentinian epidemic of 2019 where something like a dozen people died out of thirty infected.
Mortality is high (around 30% of infected, once you develop lung symptoms around 50%) but R0 number is low. Usually the studied R0 number has been below 1. This mean that each person rarely spread it to more than one other person. For comparison covid R0 was something between 2 and 4. This is the main reason to think it won’t spread a lot.
This virus has been around a lot, but it’s true that it has maybe never been in a situation like now with worries about quick international spread via airlines.
Currently most worries are about how easy is to actually spread human to human. There was a case of a flight attendant who was tested after a short contact with an infected but apparently has tested negative (her symptoms were apparently unrelated to the virus). So for now we must watch out if the people who were in flights with some of the infected have also been infected. If there are none or very few infected of those airplane passengers we could, most likely, breath safe, as the danger would be low. If we start to see infections after short contact then we should worry. As of this morning I start to believe that we are on the former scenario, as there has currently not been any positive test after a short contact.
My overall worry is that with globalization on the rise and international fast travel growing each year we will start seeing more and more of these epidemics. It’s just a question of time. From my point of view is not if there will be a pandemic virus that would wipe out a high chunk of the population. I think that’s guaranteed if we don’t change our traveling habits. It’s just a matter of when.
This is the most in depth response yet, thank you
From my point of view is not if there will be a pandemic virus that would wipe out a high chunk of the population. I think that’s guaranteed if we don’t change our traveling habits. It’s just a matter of when.
Yes I agree with you actually. The reasoning behind this conclusion is airtight, yet no one wants to go there because it’s such a disturbing thought.
And even though the COVID lab leak theory is controversial, there have been many well documented lab leaks of other biohazards, viral or otherwise. If we keep poking around with these things it increases the odds of another pandemic increase even further, whether that be by a malicious actor doing it intentionally or someone letting it slip by mistake
Not very, it spreads human to human but much less aggressively than flu or covid.
“We do believe that there may be some human-to-human transmission that’s happening among the really close contacts, the husband and wife, people who’ve shared cabins,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, the director of epidemic and pandemic management at the World Health Organization, speaking at a press conference on Tuesday.
…
However, Debbink says, if this is indeed human-to-human transmission, the virus does not seem to be highly transmissible because then “you would have a lot more cases on the cruise ship, just from people being around each other in pretty close proximity.”
Three patients suspected of having the hantavirus were evacuated from the MV Hondius cruise ship and were on their way to the Netherlands for medical care, the World Health Organization said Wednesday. The three are German, Dutch and British nationals, including a British crew member, according to the WHO.
Tranquilo, Chuy. Better not to fret over that what one can’t control.
Not very. There are a lot more “this could turn into a pandemic” incidents that don’t turn into pandemics than those that do.
No need to panic. The virus is rarely transmitted from human to human or via air.
Cruise ships are a hot bed for diseases though: Many people in a confined space going to places with diseases that their body has no resistance against. So your best protection is simply not going near the ship.
On the topic of staff escaping: Given that the ship hasn’t been able to dock so far I highly doubt that’s true.
Allegedly this one is confirmed to transmit humans to human (South Africa found it to be the case I believe?) and there’s cases in like Switzerland, it’s not like the disease spontaneously formed and then they quarantined they’ve been getting on and off the boats for weeks before they stopped
Updoot for calm approach, but it does appear that, at least in one case on the cruise ship herself, one passenger transmitted it to another.
NO claim it was airborne though. Could have been clothing, shared food, a zillion different vectors.
Yes, there has been human to human transmission, however as I wrote it rarely happens. Of course, close contact like in a cruise ship full of people is going to increase the risk.
I agree but to give some context to the staff escaping, this probably was started because one of the people airvaced to a hospital was a staff member. They didn’t “escape” they got sick and needed emergency medical treatment. I can believe someone heard a staff member was no longer on board and warped that into staff “escaping”.
this source claims
Authorities in Switzerland also said a former passenger who tested positive was being treated at a Zurich hospital. The passenger had left the ship at St Helena and it was unclear how he had travelled to Switzerland or which countries he might have passed through. Swiss authorities insisted there was “no risk” to the public
It also claims
But a limited spread among close contacts has been observed in some previous outbreaks with the Andes strain, which has spread in South America, including Argentina, where the cruise trip started in March.
I thought I read there was also a british man who was a member of the staff, I will look and try to get a source to back that up.
One of the women who got infected (she knew, her husband had already died and she was very ill) got onto a plane to Johannesburg and died in Johannesburg.
Did she get on a commercial plane by herself or was this a planned airlift to a hospital, though?
It was a commercial flight with 80 passengers. WHO is searching for them.
Also, another patient from the ship is in a hospital in Switzerland. I have no idea how they got there, but I think it’s safe to say that the ship has not been isolated to begin with.
No, because you can’t do anything about it anymore than you could do about COVID.
Not at all. Not even a little bit.
Human-to-human transmission is extremely rare.
You get it from mouse shit. It’s significantly more likely that the people who got it were all exposed to the same mouse shit than it is that they gave it to each other.
You should be way more worried about the mice on that ship coming off and shitting.
Starting this off with: I am not an epidemiologist and most of the epidemiologist I’m seeing online aren’t yet too concerned
That being said, they have not found any rodents on the ship, though that does not mean they didn’t just them in their search. The version on the ship has been confirmed to be the Andes Virus (ANDV) which is human-to-human transmissible in a way that most hantavirus are not
It’s hard to say exactly how the virus will behave outside of a cruise ship (which are known for spreading diseases more than other locations), but we can potentially look at a past outbreak in 2018 in a small town for an idea
In this work, we described the isolation of the strain responsible for the largest ANDV PTP transmission outbreak, which occurred in the small town of Epuyén and began on November 2, 2018. This strain, ARG-Epuyén, exhibited a high capacity for PTP transmission, necessitating the implementation of quarantine measures to curtail further spread [8]. The median reproductive number (the mean number of secondary cases caused by an infected person) was 2.12 before control measures were implemented and subsequently dropped to below 1.0 by late January
Worried? No. Earmark it though. Every few years there’s a new potential bug it’s just part of being a species, this one looks gnarly but too soon to tell. That being said, wear masks courteously and wash your hands. If things get bad again we’ll all find out together
To add on to the points here, hantavirus is lethal in a way that doesn’t translate to widespread pandemics easily. Coronavirus is unique in that while it was 5:1 more lethal than similarly transmissible airborn viruses, that was the “Goldilocks zone” for a virus with its lethality and transmissibility to do maximum damage. Lots of excess death, but the average person generally only had a slightly rough go of it. Hantavirus has >30% lethality in many forms, and is extremely likely to burn itself out before any sort of epidemic status.
So ultimately, very unfortunate for those that contract it, but its characteristics put it way below pretty much every other airborn illness in terms of what keeps me up at night.
Anyway, if they were smart, they would’ve started in Madagascar. I’m not worried, no way this is the one.
Covid plays the long game, though. People who only had a rough time of it can die as a result of it years later.
Sure, but that’s the point, it’s not lethal enough to kill you faster than you can spread it, yet lethal enough that you can’t discount the aftereffects.
That’s true of all flu strains.
COVID is just the one we’ve studied the most, because of the pandemic and the number of cases.
There’s a lot of studies showing that “regular” flu strains can cause lasting damage to cardiovascular systems years/decades down the road.
COVID is just the most prominent flu strain, and the one we have collected the most data on. But all flues are really, really bad for you long term if you get them.
Does the flu cause heart attacks and strokes due to vein and arterial damage?
Covid is a systemic disease, flu is a respiratory disease.
Exactly this.
It’s macabre, but its high mortality rate and small window of transmissibility before symptoms appear, pretty much keeps this from becoming a pandemic. It’s too effective at killing the host.
Something like COVID survives because it has a mortality rate a hundredth of this, but has a huge window of transmissibility before symptoms start appearing, or the symptoms are very mild.
The larger that window, the scarier a virus gets.
Hentavirus is terrifying if you do contract it, because you’ve got roughly a 1 in 3 chance of dying, but that mortality rate is also the reason why it’s not going to spread to every corner of the world.
It’s only newsworthy and scary for the people on that cruise ship since it can be passed pretty easily in such tight, close quarters.
Having worked on a cruiseship, it is insane how fast a single person with a cold becomes 80% of the crew having a cold even if that original person didn’t leave their quarters the whole time they were ill.
I’ve heard horror stories of working on cruise ships. How was it?
It was not any more horrible than a normal janitorial/housekeeping job except for the hours. 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. No weekends. No days off for the whole 5 months you’re on the ship. But you make bank and have no where or no reason to spend anything since you get fed and a place to sleep.
Do things spread so fast on a cruise ship die to the ventilation?
It’s because you’re all confined to a relatively small area. You see the same kind of contagion spreadage at conventions, too, but if you’re really sick you can leave and quaratine yourself. You can’t so easily get off a boat.
There are several hundred cases of Hantavirus in the USA and various parts of South America every year. Doesn’t make the news, doesn’t turn into a pandemic.
You’ll be fine unless you’ve been in close proximity to someone who’s been infected.
I thought it couldn’t transfer between humans? Only from rodent saliva/pee/poop
Just like any something-virus. It isn’t just one strain, it is usually a family of several diverse virus with slightly different features. Hanta virus has several varieties, this one is transmisible among humans.
How many cases are Andes strain on a cruise ship?
Not saying we should be freaking out, but alert seems fine.
I’ve got no idea, and sure being alert is a sensible idea. If it looks like its starting to spread in the countries where the ship stopped then I’ll start taking whatever precautions are recommended
When I ask it I get down voted to oblivion. When YOU ask it its fine???
I sat next to an army medic of the German-French brigade at a concert yesterday. When I scooted closer to her because other people wanted to sit down I said “Don’t worry, I don’t have the hanta virus” and she said “How do you know? You could catch it on the Schwäbische Alb, it’s not a tropical virus.”
So I’m not particularly worried, especially because journalists are notoriously bad at interpreting WHO communications.
journalists are notoriously bad at interpreting WHO communications
Or particularly good at making a sensational mountain that’ll get clicks out of a molehill. Gotta sell your stories, after all.
A former colleague got it in the area of Heidenheim. They were sweeping out the attic of a very old, mouse infested house and didn’t wear any masks though they swept up a lot of dust.
As long as you don’t act careless while in a more risky environment you’re usually fine when it comes to hanta virus.
Is it the “mouse infested” part that made it risky?
Yes, mouse excrements were the culprit. Because they weren’t wearing masks or other protection they swirled particles up in the air and breathed them in. So us actually pretty easy to avoid :)
