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 four Californians who were exposed to the Andes hantavirus virus in connection to an outbreak aboard the MV Hondius.
Three people have died and at least five more have been sickened in the rare outbreak aboard the luxury cruise ship, which was carrying 150 passengers and departed the southern tip of Argentina April 1. Six cases are confirmed, and the three others were reported as probable, as of May 8.
None of the Californians who have been exposed are experiencing symptoms, and all are being closely monitored, according to state Public Health Officer Dr. Erica Pan.
The Santa Clara County resident had disembarked from the MV Hondius before the outbreak was recognized, she said. Their exposure was reported to the department last week.
Two more Californians were identified among more than a dozen cruise passengers who were evacuated from the ship to the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha on Sunday. There, they are undergoing a health assessment. The fourth person being monitored was exposed to an ill patient on a flight traveling through South Africa.
Pan said that resident, who is in Sacramento County, came into brief, close contact with an ill patient from the ship while on the aircraft, but the sick person was removed from the flight prior to takeoff.
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.
Pan said the California residents have been asked to modify their daily activities, including avoiding close or prolonged contact with others, wearing a respirator or mask if they must be around people indoors and avoiding sharing beds or personal items.
“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 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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