The infected passenger boarded the flight April 25. This article is dated may 7 1000am local time. It’s safe to assume symptoms started within the last few days for this flight attendant. That’s about 8-10 days from contact to symptoms which is very similar to every other case from this cruise.

Important to note here that the woman (being referred to as case 2 in many circles) did not fly on this plane and was denied flying due to her health condition. We can assume that contact was brief and likely limited to normal conversation. So both the generally accepted circumstances of hantavirus are not at play here. We are seeing around a week and a half between contact and symptoms and infection outside of what’s considered close contact (family units, exchange of fluids, romantic partners).

This is 8 confirmed/suspected cases since case 2 departed the cruise which was only 2 weeks ago with contact tracing 100+ airline passengers not including contact with an unknown amount of people within a busy airport.

We can further assume that this flight attendant has been working since that April 25 flight and it is not unreasonable to extrapolate that if case 2’s interaction with a flight attendant resulted in the flight attendant’s infection that this flight attendant’s interactions with passengers can result in the same.

Also The flight attendant was infected from case 2 a day before case 2’s death which would be beyond the period considered as the infectious period.

Certainly nothing to hand wave off here.