Health officials are monitoring a Bay Area resident who was exposed to hantavirus on the MV Hondius cruise ship.
The Santa Clara County resident has returned home to California, the county’s department of public health confirmed Saturday.
Dr. Sarah Rudman, the county’s health officer, said Santa Clara officials are in contact with the passenger and are monitoring them in coordination with the state’s Department of Public Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Right now, there is no known risk to the people of Santa Clara County,” Rudman said in a video message.
The Bay Area resident is one of at least two Californians who were exposed to the Andes hantavirus aboard the MV Hondius. Federal officials notified the California Department of Public Health that the second passenger remained on the ship as of Friday.
Three people have died, and at least five more have been sickened in a rare outbreak aboard the luxury cruise ship, which was carrying 150 passengers and departed the southern tip of Argentina on April 1.
Six cases are confirmed, and the three others were reported as probable, as of May 8.
The CDC said 17 U.S. passengers had been evacuated from the ship and were en route to the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha on Sunday.
Two passengers, including one who tested “mildly positive” and another with symptoms, were being transported in the plane’s biocontainment units “out of an abundance of caution,” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said.
Andes hantavirus is part of a family of viruses that spreads mostly through the urine, feces and saliva of rodents, but in rare cases, can be transmitted person to person through repeated, close contact with someone who is ill. Hantavirus can cause serious diseases in humans, CDPH said.
According to state health officials, daily protocol includes temperature checks and assessment for any relevant symptoms. There are no known cases of asymptomatic Andes hantavirus.
“This is not something you would contract through casual contact at Starbucks or Trader Joe’s,” said Matt Willis, a Bay Area-based epidemiologist and the former head of Marin’s public health department for a decade. “This is someone who would be a risk only to those who were in very close contact with them, like in the household.”
Willis said the Santa Clara passenger is not experiencing symptoms and is isolated at home with twice-daily monitoring. He said it’s likely that they are not infected.
“Transmissibility is low,” he told KQED on Monday. “We don’t know the exact nature of the exposure of this individual on board before they disembarked, but it was not likely to be that kind of intimate exposure that we’ve already seen in secondary cases.”
Among those on the ship who have been infected, he said, are people who were in close contact with the initial patients, including the ship’s primary doctor.
As a Bay Area resident, Willis said, he’s confident that his own family is safe.
“I think we all carry this experience of a pandemic close,” he told KQED. “These kinds of stories — the cruise ship, a respiratory illness being spread from person to person — obviously invokes a lot of fear. It’s important to remember that this is not COVID.”
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