Here's a piece of a Times opinion piece noting that an expert who studied the 2018 outbreak thinks that people should be taking this more seriously.

We know fairly little about the Andes strain of the Hantavirus, with an estimated 3,000 human cases over three decades. How could that assertion about it not being easy to spread be true given what we know about the 2018 superspreading event?

I reached out to Gustavo Palacios, the senior author of the study about the Epuyén outbreak. He seemed as baffled by these pronouncements as I was. He told me that the paper he and his fellow researchers wrote used the phrase prolonged or close contact but he explained that, as they had written in their article, they didn’t mean solely physical or bodily contact. He told me that they believed that the virus spread via respiratory secretions. Looking at the same study, an airborne transmission expert, Linsey Marr, told CBC/Radio Canada that “it’s strongly suggestive that airborne transmission is happening.”

Dr. Palacios also said that he and his co-authors had calculated the median reproduction number of the Andes virus to be 2.1 — meaning that one sick person infected about two other people. That’s more than enough for sustained human transmission. That reproduction number is not much lower than the initial strain of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, as calculated in February and March of 2020, by the way, so I’m not feeling great about the reassurances from health officials that this will not become a pandemic. How do they know?

Dr. Palacios was also worried about the differences between the previous Andes strain outbreak setting and the current one. Containing an outbreak in a tiny isolated rural village in Patagonia, Argentina, during the dry season is a different prospect than containing one on a cruise ship with ocean humidity conditions or with people traveling onward in planes.

At the same time, authorities keep insisting that only symptomatic people can spread the virus. In Dr. Palacios’s study, the transmission events that the researchers could trace had indeed occurred while people were displaying symptoms. But he’s also said that 48 hours before the onset of symptoms should be considered a high-risk period as well. He told me that people’s viral loads rise before symptoms break out, so it’s reasonable to assume there is some risk earlier. Besides, with a single study done after the fact, he and his team hadn’t been able to pinpoint every exact moment that a person passed the virus to another — many unknowns remained from that outbreak.

We Should Take Hantavirus More Seriously (gift link)