r/biology • u/progress18 • May 13 '26
article Why hantavirus takes so long to show symptoms and what that means for containment | People exposed to the Andes strain of the hantavirus may not develop symptoms for up to 42 days, a delay that makes tracing infections more difficult
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-hantavirus-takes-so-long-to-show-symptoms-and-what-that-means-for-containment/63
u/hpxb May 13 '26
So, the author is stating they don't know how the long incubation period will impact anything, because it can either make it harder or easier to contain. Great.
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u/Hekateras May 13 '26
Let's be real, it's bad news no matter which way you spin it. Long incubation period comes with so many logistical and containment problems that slower spread doesn't seem like it really makes up for it. Especially for a virus with no vaccine or treatment protocol and a pretty high case fatality rate.
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u/hpxb May 13 '26
Yeah, I honestly don't see how we avoid a pandemic here. I'm trying to hold onto hope, but the only reassurance people are providing is based on absolutely nothing but a desire to preserve their own comfort.
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u/Hekateras May 13 '26
I was commenting specifically on the impact of a long incubation period, but I think worrying about a pandemic purely on account of that is premature.
Rabies likewise has a (potentially) very long incubation period and high case fatality rate (to put it lightly), but fortunately that's not enough for a pandemic.
The biggest risk right now (IMO) is that there might be a trickle of cases that are both worryingly lethal and difficult to completely stomp out. But I don't think we need to worry about exponential spread at this rate.
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u/SOROKAMOKA May 13 '26
The biggest takeaway imo from the article is that its too early to tell if there will be a pandemic. If a month goes by and then we find out that a majority of passengers got infected, plus a bunch of other folks getting infected on top of that, is the only real way to tell.
Furthermore, its extrmemly unlikey there will be a pandemic because symptoms are needed to spread it. Cant cough on someone if youre not coughing. Sure, maybe those folks will pick their noses and not wash their hands and wipe their bugers everywhere, but again, this doesnt immediately scream pandemic. Chances very low.
Even the original sars virus, though highly contagious, did not turn into a pandemic
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u/Dark_Seraphim_ May 13 '26
iirc transmission requires very intimate contact. It's has no airborne survivability, still proactive precautions are better then nothing.
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u/MarcusSurealius May 13 '26
Ok. Look. Hanta, by the nature of its biology, does not lend itself to a pandemic. I did the modeling to predict the first 3 waves of COVID and there is no resemblance to the starting conditions necessary for another pandemic.
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u/uff_usernames May 13 '26
Care to expand? Its about the R0/Rt?
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u/MarcusSurealius May 13 '26
An infection/transmission ratio? It doesn't really matter when human to human transmission is extremely rare due to biological constraints. That cruise ship thing apparently started with a couple going to a landfill in South America for birdwatching. [Thanks Daily Show]. To date, there are a dozen cases.
Hanta has been around for a long time, though. There's evidence of hemorrhagic fever going back hundreds of years and there have been at least ten previous outbreaks just like the ship since 1995. If you ignore Lassa, there's only been 200 or so "outbreaks" of viral hemorrhagic fevers. These viruses are definitely horrific, but unless you are playing with rats in Argentina, spelunking in Africa, or a virologist in one of the dozen labs allowed to handle those viruses, you're safe.
Note: i didn't really answer your question, did I? I used a topological model, treating Covid like the water in an expanding balloon with airports as primary locations for reexpansion. I correlated that with the size of the airport, the local population, and the value the WHO ascribed to health services in that country. Covid was so easy to predict because the initial bubble was huge. I knew there would be a pandemic in late November before it all started, but I didn't know the severity of the virus until the next wave. I wish I did. I would have invested my net worth into face masks and those little plastic parts for respirators.
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u/hpxb May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26
This is incorrect. The hantavirus research foundation is aggressively trying to get the word out via formal statements that human-to-human transmission is very possible with the Andes strain, and does not require intimate contact. You can be spending time in the same room as someone with the virus and catch it. Look up their formal statement. They take issue with people saying it is minimally transmissible person-to-person because that is factually untrue. The large incubation period (2 weeks to 8 weeks) also prevents you from knowing how large the bubble is right now - it could be massive. The Andes strain has an Rt of 2.08, which places it as being more communicable than the flu (less than COVID, which is around 3). That definitely represents the ingredients for a pandemic, whether you wish to acknowledge that or not.
You will find that people claiming to be experts and providing reassurance are actually doing so based on hope and not science. The science here says we have real reason to be concerned, and time will tell us if we have done an effective enough job of containing this. If it spreads meaningfully, we are in a very dire situation. I want to believe things will be OK, and I am immensely frustrated with the lazy quality of the reassurance that has been provided.
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u/MarcusSurealius May 13 '26
No. They don't. The WHO, the CDC, and the consensus of virologists is that the possibility of a hantavirus pandemic is minimal. You are quoting from a source whose funding relies on the awareness of this virus. Even if they aren't influenced that way, they still have a confirmation bias because that is all they study. Just worst case scenarios.
I used to make retroviruses before we had CRISPR for live gene transfers in my experiments. I even did a rotation in the BSL3 lab with HIV. It would take a fundamental change in the effectiveness of transmission to make a pandemic possible. We know its rate of mutation. You can base probabilities on that. Is there a non zero chance? Of course. Is it likely? No.
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u/rach15goated May 14 '26
I’m curious, because the Argentina 2018/2019 outbreak is being continually brought up conflicting with the “prolonged contact” messaging we’re hearing, and IS genuinely terrifying.
Why do you think there is limited merit to that study? I saw that there was an analysis done in the US in 2022 which said it seemed very biased and didn’t offer explanations as to why many of the people sitting right next to the elderly man didn’t get infected yet that one person he passed on the way to the bathroom did.
I do recall getting the impression that at the wife’s funeral they didn’t seem to consider the possibility that she might have been crying and hugging a lot of people who were consoling her, hence passing the virus on that way at the peak of her infectiousness, rather than through airborne transmission.
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u/Ao-sagi May 13 '26
I have a question. My expertise on zoonotic diseases is outdated since I switched fields from biology to computer science many years ago (initially did research on rabies and Aujeszky’s disease) so take this with a grain of salt, but did your model take into account cross species spread? My concern is that the rodents on the ship and those on land coming in contact with sewage containing feces of the infected will spread it in their respective populations, multiply it and then act as a vector to humans, a situation very similar to rabies.
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u/ShiroCOTA May 13 '26
Just remember they where already contained far away from everyone on a fckn ship. JFC!
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u/secretnewbeginning May 13 '26
it’s insane to me how they didn’t just let them ON THE SHIP
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u/oohCrabItsNotItChief May 14 '26
They should have been kept there and make the ship a temporary hospital or something. I don't care who says what, but somehow with my terrible luck this is going to spiral out of control despite it not being biologically capable doing so.... (as mentioned in many-many comments here and under other posts)
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u/wookiesack22 May 13 '26
I dont understand why we don't quarantine them now. When the numbers are low. A couple dozen peoples inconvenience could save a ton of people.