People exposed to hantavirus on a cruise ship could go home sooner than expected, a University of Nebraska Medical Center expert said Tuesday.
One passenger is hospitalized, and 15 are being monitored at the National Quarantine Unit in Omaha. Dr. Mara Jana Broadhurst of UNMC said the incubation period can be up to six weeks, and the facility will remain available. However, she added, “Decisions about how best to strike a balance between monitoring in these facilities and monitoring at home is something that is an ongoing conversation.”
Dr. Bobbi Pritt of the Mayo Clinic said while the disease is serious, there’s not a risk to general public in open spaces. “I would say that we should definitely respect this virus and not trivialize it, but also not catastrophize it,” she said.
The quarantine unit at UNMC is designed for individuals who need to be monitored, but not necessarily treated. The biocontainment unit, on the other hand, is a hospital-based care space, Dr. Angela Hewlett, medical director of Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, said at a news conference earlier this week.”
Hantavirus is an illness typically tied to rodents, but it may have passed from human to human aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship, the World Health Organization (WHO) said. Three ship passengers have died since April 11.
WHO has identified the hantavirus strain that impacted the cruise ship as Andes virus, which is rare and usually limited to people who have close contact with the infected person. WHO currently assesses the risk to the global population from this event as low and continues to monitor the situation.
Two other passengers from the cruise ship are being monitored at Emory University in Atlanta.
The Medical Center is one of 13 Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Centers and holds the only federally funded National Quarantine Unit. The facilities at UNMC have been used in the past to quarantine COVID-19 patients as well as two doctors infected with Ebola virus in 2014.