An update, for those of you who are Monitoring the Situation™.

More than two dozen passengers left a cruise ship hit by a deadly hantavirus outbreak on April 24 without contact tracing, nearly two weeks after the first passenger died on board, the ship operator and Dutch officials said Thursday.

...

The company said Thursday 29 passengers left the vessel at St. Helena, while the Dutch Foreign Ministry put the number at about 40.

St. Helena is a tiny island in the absolute middle of nowhere. However, it does have a runway, and that means those who left could theoretically be anywhere on planet Earth in the next 48 hours.

The viral outbreak onboard the HV Hondius is hantavirus, a disease found in rodent droppings. It has more than a 30% lethality rate, but it does not usually transmit between humans ... except, that is, for a strain in Argentina.

And guess which couple was bird-watching in Argentina, where they apparently visited a landfill, right before they got on the cruise ship?

The first confirmed case of hantavirus in a passenger on the ship was only on May 2, the World Health Organization has previously said. That was in a British man evacuated from the ship to South Africa from Ascension Island three days after the St. Helena stop.

Three passengers have died in the outbreak, and several others are sick. Three people, including the ship's doctor, were evacuated Wednesday while the ship was near the West African island country of Cape Verde and taken to Europe for treatment.

Both the husband and wife who originally contracted the disease are dead. A third deceased victim, a German women, remains onboard.

But here's where things get even dicier.

Authorities in South Africa and Europe are trying to trace contacts of any passengers who previously got off the ship. It emerged Wednesday that a man tested positive for hantavirus in Switzerland after he also disembarked at St. Helena and flew home, though his precise movements aren't clear.

In addition, the wife of the British man who first succumbed to the virus was flown to Johannesburg, where she was briefly put on a plane with passengers headed to The Netherlands. The pilots, however, decided to remove her, not wanting to risk transmission. She then died in South Africa.

But now...

In the U.S., health authorities are now monitoring three people in three states who had potential contact with the infected.

Hantavirus is not the same as Covid. This is the only strain to pass between humans and it takes prolonged exposure for that to happen. It is not nearly as infectious as Covid.

However, unlike Covid, which has a mortality rate near zero in healthy adults, hantavirus is super lethal and can take weeks for symptoms to appear.

The CDC says there's no reason to worry, but no one trusts them anymore, so it was sort of a pointless update.

The cruise ship, meanwhile, still has 140 passengers and staff onboard. They are now sailing for the Canary Islands, where they will be tested before ... being allowed to go home?

The Andes strain of hantavirus regularly kills a handful of people in South America each year, so there's plenty of evidence that a few isolated cases aren't going to spread like wildfire.

However, locals who get infected aren't sailing/flying all over the world.

Is there any downside to quarantining 150 people in nice apartments for a month just to be safe??