Tangle - The hantavirus outbreak.

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

On Monday, 18 Americans returned to the United States from a cruise ship where passengers had contracted a rare strain of hantavirus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) transported the passengers to specialized quarantine facilities in Nebraska and Georgia; one American tested positive for the virus. As of Tuesday afternoon, three deaths — a Dutch couple and a German woman — nine confirmed cases and two more suspected cases have been linked to the cruise ship outbreak. Health officials say the risk to the general public remains low.The modern moon race.For more than 50 years, no human has set foot on the lunar surface. But now, the United States, China, Russia, and others are all planning to return — not just to visit, but to stay. In our latest video, Associate Producer Aidan Gorman explores why the world’s great powers are suddenly dead set on getting back to the moon, and how the race could shape the future beyond Earth.https://youtu.be/j-6etWMgNv0?si=uSqf6nN9saY_RfzGAd-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the survey: How much is your social circle discussing the current hantavirus outbreak? Let us know.Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by: Ari Weitzman and audio edited and mixed by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tango podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take. I'm your host for today, Tango's managing editor, Ari Weitzman, and our topic is the hauntavirus outbreak. Before we get into that, though, I want to promote a YouTube video that we just produced today. Our associate producer, Aynne Gorman, has been putting out absolutely phenomenal content online in the last couple months, and today's is his best effort yet, in my opinion. The topic is the modern moon race. For over 50 years, no human has foot on the lunar surface, but now the USA, China, Russia, and others are all planning to return and not to visit, but to stay.

Aidan's video today explores why the world's great powers are suddenly dead set on returning to the moon. and you can see that video on our YouTube channel and check the show notes for a link. With that said, I'll pass it over to Audrey for today's intro. Thanks, Ari. First up, we have today's quick hits. Number one, a senior Pentagon official

told Congress that the estimated cost to date of the Iran War is $29 billion, up from a $25 billion estimate given at the end of April. Separately, U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly assessed that Iran has regained access to 30 of the 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, in addition to most of its other missile sites, launchers, and underground facilities. Number two, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty McCarrey resigned, reportedly over the agency's decision to authorize

fruit-flavored e-cigarettes, which he opposed. President Donald Trump was reportedly preparing to fire McCari before his resignation. Number three, the Senate voted 51 to 45 to confirm confirm Kevin Warsh to the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. The chamber is expected to vote on Wednesday on confirming Warsh to be chair of the central bank. Number four, President Trump arrives in China this morning for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The two are expected to discuss trade relations, energy, and the Iran war. Number five, Russia launched an estimated 200 drones at Ukraine, attacking locations across the country. At least five people were injured, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that over 100 Russian drones remain in Ukrainian airspace.

This morning, health officials monitoring those Americans who returned home following that deadly hantavirus outbreak on board a cruise ship. The first American to test positive being treated inside the biocontainment unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. 15 others are being evaluated for symptoms in the quarter. unit here. Once released, they will be allowed to monitor their symptoms at home or remain here for the 42-day quarantine period. On Monday, 18 Americans returned to the United States from a cruise ship where passengers had contracted a rare strain of hauntavirus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC transported the passengers to specialized quarantine facilities in Nebraska and Georgia.

One American tested positive for the virus and one other is experiencing symptoms. As of Tuesday afternoon, three deaths, a Dutch couple and a German woman, nine confirmed cases and two more suspected cases have been linked to the cruise ship outbreak. Health officials say the risk to the general public remains low. For some more context, Honda viruses are a family of viruses typically transmitted between rodents, which can then infect humans who touch or breathe in rodent urine or droppings. The Andes strain, which the World Health Organization, or who, identified in the cruise ship outbreak is the only known subtype that allows for person-to-person transmission. Symptoms of the Andes strain include fatigue, fever and chills, and in severe cases,

can cause a respiratory disease called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which has a case fatality rate of 38%. Approximately 150 people were aboard the M.V. Hondias, a Dutch polar expedition cruise ship, which set sail from Argentina on April 1st. When a 70-year-old Dutch man fell ill with respiratory symptoms and died on board from a then undetermined cause. Nine days after his death, on April 24th, the man's wife and over two dozen other passengers disembarked from the vessel in the remote island of St. Helena in the Southern Atlantic. The Dutch woman then flew to South Africa, where she died from the virus. On May 2nd, a German woman still on board the cruise ship also died from the virus.

That same day, the WHO identified the incidents as a honta virus outbreak. Shortly after, health organizations began isolation and isolation. and evacuation efforts. Most passengers have now returned to their home countries and the ship is expected to dock in the Netherlands on Sunday or Monday. Health officials acknowledge the novel multi-country nature of the spread, but say a larger outbreak is unlikely. On Tuesday, Who Director General Tedros Adonim Gabraeus said

that all suspected and confirmed cases have been isolated and managed under strict medical supervision, minimizing any risk of further transmission. On May 8th, the CDC activated its level three response, the agency's lowest level of emergency activation. In a press conference on Monday, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the CDC has the outbreak under control and that we're not worried about it. President Donald Trump added that the CDC acted very, very quickly and called the disease very hard to catch. Next, we'll explain what the left, right, and epidemiologists are saying about the hauntavirus outbreak. Then I'll pass it back to managing editor Ari Weissman for his take.

We'll be right back after this quick break. First up, what the left is saying. The left is concerned about the outbreak, particularly as the Trump administration has divested from global health systems. Some say health officials are overconfident in declaring what they know. In the bulwark, Jonathan Cohn asked seriously, how nervous should we be about hauntavirus? Donald Trump has spent much of a second presidency, waging an all-out assault, on America's global health infrastructure by downsizing or eliminating

existing agencies and programs and transforming them in ways that make them instruments of other goals, like extracting mineral rights or ending DEI. This assault has also included withdrawing from the World Health Organization and from Global Health Cooperation more generally. That has left the federal government

without some of the tools, systems, and personnel it has deployed in the past. The result is a federal response to outbreaks that is weaker overall and could falter in the face of a more serious threat. The ability to assess this hauntavirus outbreak so quickly is testimony to the sophisticated international infrastructure now in place for disease surveillance and response,

and that infrastructure didn't appear out of thin air. It was constructed over time, with much of the essential money, leadership, and expertise coming from the United States. The worry now is that the infrastructure is losing American support thanks to Trump. In the New York Times, Zane App DeFetchie wrote,

a new viral outbreak, the same mistakes all over again. During a press conference last week, a WHO official addressed people who had disembarked, asking them to present themselves to health care authorities if they were developing symptoms. Who officials also kept defining transmission as happening through close, prolonged contact. But even these definitions still suffer from a lack of learning from the COVID experience, such as limiting exposure to being within about six feet for a cumulative period of more than 15 minutes. We know from the study of airborne transmission that that guidance may be too rigid

and fail to capture the full risk profile of the virus. Public health officials would be more helpful if they stopped constantly reassuring people about the likelihood of future events they can't accurately calculate, like the odds of a pandemic occurring or how long this outbreak could last, and just told us more details about the things that matter,

mode of transmission, lengthy period of incubation, and the inevitable uncertainty of something for which there is little actual knowledge. If we're lucky, this hauntavirus outbreak will peter out. If we're unlucky, it should be unthinkable, but here we are. Next up, what the right is saying. Many on the right say the risk of a global health crisis currently appears low.

Others note how the outbreak has fueled dumerism on the left. In the spectator, John Power suggested, hauntavirus doesn't look like the next COVID. There is only one strain of hauntavirus which we know can spread from person to person, the Andy's strain of the illness. the anti-strain can only be spread through very close contact. That generally means things like sharing drinks, hugging, and other things we would not normally do with strangers.

That means that the non-pharmaceutical interventions we saw during COVID, such as lockdown or hand-space and space measures, would have little impact on the transmission of this virus. And because this disease is so difficult to spread, it is unlikely to develop into a full pandemic. The need for very close contact for human-to-human transmission is a characteristic that hauntavirus shares with monkeypox. Monkeypox has indeed been a challenge, particularly in parts of Africa,

but most people and indeed most dogs have been able to avoid the worst of it. From what we know at this stage, hauntavirus is in some ways more like monkeypox than coronavirus, a problem but a manageable one, one that the vast majority of people will be able to avoid by keeping calm and carrying on. In National Review, Noah Rothman wrote about the market for a new pandemic. There isn't a cable news producer on Earth who could resist the temptations presented by the outbreak of a rare and deadly communicable disease, and on a cruise ship, no less.

There is a species of news consumer who has little interest in relative risk. They seek out stronger stuff in their media diet. For those who want the press to stimulate their already hyperactive amygdala, there is no shortage of irresponsible communicators who are willing to trigger their reader's fight-or-flight response by evaluating the outbreak through the prism of their contempt for the Trump administration. More perverse still is the unstated wish fathering the thought that this virus could bloom into the next global pandemic. Maybe if it did, and if many more people died, the abundance of caution that typified the public health apparatus's draconian response to COVID-19 would be retroactively vindicated. Fortunately for the rest of us, this hauntivirus outbreak is unlikely to relieve this unhappy cohort of their bitterness. The mainstream news outlets that are covering this outbreak like a tragedy rather than a disaster are getting the story right.

but there will always be a market for dumerism. Finally, what epidemiologists are saying. Epidemiologists say the risk level is still low, but some say the CDC can better communicate with the public. Others highlight the importance of international cooperation in limiting the diseases spread. In your local epidemiologist, Dr. Caitlin Jedalina shared a haunt of virus update.

The virus has a long incubation period, up to 45 days with a median of 18 days, during which it can enter the body, latch on, and wreak havoc. Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of time and biology. The international response has been fantastic so far. I continue to be impressed by whose coordination across multiple countries, their public briefings, the swiftness of contract tracing and testing, and their success in negotiating with Spain to allow the boat to dock.

Public health scientists are on it. CDC scientists are actively involved behind the scenes, including standing up an emergency operation center and coordinating with the who. That said, I do have some major questions for CDC leadership and the administration. I want to know, why haven't they deployed a team to help with the international response?

Why haven't physicians been alerted through the Health Alert Network or Han, as they typically would? Why is there zero communication with the public or updates to the website? This is abnormal. The muffling of scientists and the lack of transparency

are unacceptable for American's safety and security. in RTI, Claire Quinter and Lauren Courtney wrote about what you should know about the Andes virus. This scenario demonstrates in real time our vulnerability to infectious diseases. It shows how quickly infectious diseases that were previously isolated to a single location can reach distant corners of the globe. It underscores just how small our world has become. It also highlights the importance of multi-country health agreements, such as the international health regulations, that are put in place to handle these types of international events. Because of the IHR, ships like the MV. Hondias have a responsibility to report to local authorities if people on border sick and to follow

stringent protocols to contain it. Should we be concerned about another global pandemic? Many of our friends and family have been asking us this question, and our response has generally been probably not. Right now, the risk to the global population remains quite low, largely because the pathogen was detected and identified early. Cases are being concerned. contained and managed to prevent further spread and escalation. The type of international coordination that we are seeing for this outbreak, guided through the IHR, is what helps protect us from known infectious threats. That's it for what the left, right, and epidemiologists are saying.

Now I'll hand it off to Ari for his take. I remember my moment clearly. After a few months of applications and interviews, I had just started working at my second ever software engineering job for a health insurance company in Pittsburgh, PA. My wife, well, then fiancé and I had just moved back east from California, where we had spent the previous four years, and we were settling into our new home and new life. A hire up in the company was holding an informal corporate style roundtable with all the new hires, the kind of rap session where an exec flips her chair around a jam about what it's like

working for company and company's values and all that good stuff. I don't remember really much of anything specific about that meaning, except for a question she asked us towards the end. Is anyone feeling nervous about this coronavirus? It was mid-February 2020. And reports were just starting to circulate online. Some new viral respiratory infection was taking hold in China. People were calling it different things. Coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-cove 2, if you worked at a healthcare company or with hedantic people. Apparently, it was like the flu, but like a really bad flu. Cases were being reported in Australia and Europe. Some people had said it had just started to hit California. I raised my hand in response to her question with the wrongest, least informed answer

I may have ever given in my life. No, I'm not nervous. It's like the flu, right? I don't know. I'm not too worried about it. That was my moment of reacting to news of COVID-19 for the first time. And I wasn't an aberration. Most people in the room nodded along, and even the health care executive leading our discussion didn't correct me. Remember, this was February 2020. We simply didn't know a lot yet. Most people I knew were as unconcerned as I was, or they were following along with the case reports as an idle curiosity, an explainer about airplane circulation here, report about some Wuhan lab there. Then two weeks later, my entire team started working remotely, downloading Zoom, and learning

how to use terms like hybrid office. My then-fiancee and I had to scramble to make our planned August wedding, quote, COVID-safe. No one contracted a case from our wedding, more because it came rather fortunately in the middle of a blissful trough in the pandemic, and less because of our attempted precautions, which quickly evaporated once the celebration began. The entire world was plunged to confusion, division, sickness, and all manner of major disruption over the next two years. And the COVID-19 pandemic would prove to be the most impactful global event since 9-11. Now, when I hear about the haunt of virus cases across the globe, I find myself thinking similar thoughts as the one I expressed in that first floor conference room six and a half years ago.

It doesn't seem that bad. I don't know. I'm not too worried about it. And that symmetry, more than anything else, concerns me. Those three years at the beginning of the decade were like a giant hole in the middle of my life. Okay, not the whole time. My wedding was a particularly beautiful event, and I have a lot of special memories for it. But still, for most people, pandemic is not a pleasant memory.

Pretty much every public health expert is saying the same thing right now. This is not like last time. This is a very different disease. chance that this becomes a global pandemic is not likely, which translates from scientific language into plain English as, no, you're right to not be worried about it. But that unanimity feels oddly discomforting, and once more, I'm not an aberration in having that response. A lot of people I talk to are expressing a similar concern, which feels like a collective trauma response. That feeling is perhaps best articulated by attacks the friend shared with me earlier this week.

Everyone I know who has a PhD thinks it's going to be nothing. So I think it's going to be a huge deal. But let's pause here. Our personal reactions to COVID-19, when public experts were sounding the alarm, have absolutely no bearing on what is going to happen now. Whether you were wrong before and overcorrecting now, or you were so impacted by the pandemic that you're in denial that this could happen again, basing your beliefs on personal narratives is not a logical chain of reasoning.

This is magical thinking, not rational thinking. Only the facts of what's happening now will have any impact on what happens later. So let's break down the facts. Haunted virus is a rare but often severe disease that causes heavy flu-like symptoms like fever, fatigue, and muscle aches. The virus spreads through rodent feces and urine. and only the anti-strain of the virus can be spread from human-human. The Andy strain, or A-N-D-V, if you work in healthcare or with pedantic people, has been a known entity for long enough for scientists to understand some key aspects of the virus.

It transmits through what every medical source I've read describes as close contact with an infected person. Its incubation period, the time between exposure and onset of symptoms, is typically about one to six weeks, but it can be even longer. A person who contract a hauntivirus pulmonary syndrome, which comes with breathing difficulty, or hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, which impacts the kidneys. The Andes virus only causes the former, hauntivirus pulmonary syndrome,

and its mortality rate can be as high as 40 to 50%. Much of our current knowledge about the disease comes from studying a 2018 event in Argentina, in which 34 people contracted the virus and 11 people died. We also don't know a lot about the disease. For example, transmission rates aren't fully understood, nor is the specific way the Andes virus spreads. A common theory is that it spread through aerosolized saliva.

And while vaccines exist for one variation of hauntavirus, they're only approved in South Korea and China and offer limited long-term protection. There is no current treatment for the disease variation, the hontavirus pulmonary syndrome, or HPS, that's represented by the Andes Strait. Now, some of that information is pretty scary. The disease has high mortality,

its incubation period is long, transmission isn't fully understood, and we don't currently have a treatment for it. Some of it is reassuring. This is not a novel virus. It can only be transmitted through close contact, and the current outbreak was detected early and is being closely monitored. But one other frightening aspect of this current outbreak is a little harder to define. Fear-based spread of misinformation.

As facts come out, it will be tempting to jump to conclusions based on unsubstantiated reports, like the recent rumor about a flight attendant who may have contracted the illness, and as an update, no, she tested negative. Politicized echo chambers will have incentives to peddle-use specific narratives based on ideology. Misinformation could travel fast in our media ecosystem as it did during COVID. But we know how to treat the virality of misinformation, even if that treatment is often painful. Be fast to learn, but be slow to know. As Noah Rothman wrote under what the right is saying,

there is no shortage of irresponsible communicators who are willing to be able to learn. to trigger their reader's flight or fight response. Be careful about stories that play to your emotions, like Trump slashing the CDC is making you vulnerable, or people are trying to scare you with twisted pandemic fantasies so that they can control you. Stories like those usually contain some truth, but they're designed to elicit a certain response.

Look outside editorial pages for news and check for multiple sources to confirm new information. Don't repeat things you weren't sure of. Be skeptical. but be curious. Remain informed about areas with confirmed reports of infected individuals and avoid those areas. And if you find reports about infected areas to be credible and reliable, share that information with others. We can't know what is going to happen next, but I feel confident about one thing. This will not be like last time. How could it? This is a different disease

in a different situation with a much different virality in a very different initial response from public health officials. Looking for irrelevant patterns is a trap and magical thinking will not be helpful. Only the current facts of the current situation will determine where we go from here. So block out the fear, be fast to learn, and be slow to know. Okay, that's it for my take today. I'm going to pass it back over to Audrey for the rest of the pod. We'll be right back after this quick break. Thanks, Ari. Next up, we have our under the radar story. On Monday, the Justice Department announced that Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, California,

had been charged with acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government. In 2022, Wang was elected to Arcadia's city council, which selects a mayor on a rotating basis. According to her plea agreement, she worked at the behest of the Chinese government from 2020 through 2022, promoting pro-China content via a website that targeted the Chinese American community. After agreeing to a guilty plea, Wang faces up to 10 years in prison. News Nation has the story and you can find the link in the show notes. Next up, one of our new sections, A Deeper Look into the Haunted Virus. From 1951 to 1953, during the Korean War,

more than 3,000 United Nations troops became sick with what was then known as Korean hemorrhagic fever. In the late 1970s, researchers in South Korea began testing trapped field mice and discovered the virus that had caused the fever. They named it the hanta virus after the nearby Hantan River. As research into the new virus continued into the 1990s, scientists eventually realized that hontoviruses were not isolated to Korea as they first thought. Instead, different strains of hontovirus exist all over the world. For a long time, hontoviruses were thought to occur only in rodents.

However, strains have been discovered in bats in Sierra Leone and in saltwater and freshwater fish in Europe and the South China Sea. Thus far, only rodent-borne Hontovirus strains have been known to infect humans. Hontovirus outbreaks among humans have popped up throughout recorded history. The earliest likely outbreak occurred in Imperial China during the warring states period

and is recorded in the Chinese medical text the inner canon of the Yellow Emperor. Researchers now also believe that British soldiers in Flanders during World War I experienced hontovirus symptoms. And in 1993, a hontovirus outbreak in the four-corner region of the southwestern United States prompted scientists to identify and research a new side effect of honda virus,

the honda virus pulmonary disease. And finally, we have our have-a-nice-day story. Last week, a tornado injured 12 people and flattened homes in a rural Mississippi neighborhood. Ashton Lemley, a storm chaser who is allergic to cats, was walking through the rubble when he heard a meow. After several minutes of looking and five minutes of paused meowing, Lemley dug under insulation to find the wet, scared kitten with his flashlight. Lemley held the seemingly uninjured kitten for a few minutes and a volunteer dried it off. People have expressed interest in adopting the kitten and some have suggested naming it tornado. In a video of the rescue, Lemley says to the cat,

It's okay, we'll get you cleaned up, baby. Don't you worry. The Associated Press has the story and you can find it in the show notes. All right, everybody, that is it for today's episode. as always if you'd like to support our work, you can head over to retangle.com to sign up for a membership. Also, don't forget to check out Associate Producer Aidan Gorman's newest video about the race to return to the moon,

which you can see on our YouTube channel or in a link in the description in our show notes. And then remember, block out the fear, be fast to learn, be slow to know, take it easy, be careful out there. And we'll talk to you next time. Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wall.

Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors Audrey Moorhead, Lindsay Canuth, and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at retangle.com.