KLM flight attendant hospitalized after contact with hantavirus | Hacker News Reader

KLM flight attendant hospitalized after contact with hantavirus

nltimes.nl

39 pointsTechTechTech27 comments

The media has reported that two British passengers were allowed to fly home, to self isolate, but I am trying to wrap my head around why this was allowed. Given what we learned from the pandemic, would it not have made more sense to have them isolated locally rather than flying back?

The interesting (and concerning) part is that hantavirus was previously believed not to be transmissible from person to person. But with the recent outbreak, this understanding might have to be updated.

No, the Andes virus is known to be the only hantavirus that is transmissible from human to human. A South African lab confirmed the British passenger was infected by Andes virus.

This strain was already known for person to person transmission. In the south of Argentina we had a big outbreak after a sick person went to a birthday party in 2019.

Some party: 34 infected, 11 died, R of 2.12, 18% infected by aerosol, incubation period 9-40 days

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2009040

This is just not true.

From https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2009040:

"was similar to the causative strain (Epilink/96) in the first known person-to-person transmission of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome caused by ANDV, which occurred in El Bolsón, Argentina, in 1996"

There are already news articles kind-of implying that the crew knew better when they told passengers that the disease was not transmissible.

it seems to be a different strain (and it's not a new one, I think)

So... hantavirus is transmissible.

They all are but generally difficult.

Andes strain is more transmissible but has only been shown to have one super spreader event previously.

I’m sure this is not the start of another pandemic but these kind of stories sure do give me the same vibe as the sort we were seeing in Jan/Feb 2020...

If this were in China (with a population of billions) I would agree. Until we see cases popping up in India/China/Mexico/Japan, we're able to let it fizzle out.

Why would “the authorities” release other passengers to come in contact with more people instead of quarantining them ?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/dozens-of-passengers-lef...

Man, I am glad the US didn’t get out of the WHO, and there is a sane and responsible HHS Secretary with RFK Jr., whose brain totally did not get eaten by a parasite.

I mean, there are only 300 or so cases recorded in history of the Andes hantavirus human-to-human transmission.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2009040#ap1&uccL...

And Trump, the wise man he is, didn’t cut a single dollar on science, especially that of epidemiology and emerging priority pathogens.

You guys are lucky there were no passengers coming back to the US and that there is no global event like the soccer World Cup starting soon or the 250th anniversary of the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/us/hantavirus-cruise-us-p...

I wouldn’t be worried too much, especially knowing how the president dealt with the coronavirus in his first term. They are just going to shine some light into your veins and/or inject disinfectants into you, and your suffering will be over in no time.

I wish my country had an administration that is this good at everything they do, but we wouldn’t know what to do with all those wins.

Best of luck, Americans.

What's up with all the sarcasm in your comment? It makes it hard to tell when you're speaking the truth versus speaking in opposites. Why not just speak plainly, so people can understand you -- comprehension should be the first goal. You're trying to communicate a serious matter.

Imagine reading a medical abstract, like the one you linked, if it were written in your style of heavy sarcasm.

> They are just going to shine some light into your veins and/or inject disinfectants into you, and your suffering will be over in no time.

Please cut out the sheer nonsense.

She/he probably reads The Onion a lot and has caught the sarcasm bug.

Those were Trump's proposed solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Their post is quite clear: the US has an utterly incompetent administration which is actively opposed to the best known method for preventing the spread of deadly viruses: vaccines. Funding for monitoring the spread of diseases has also been cut. The World Cup is a large event which will bring people from all over the world into the US and into close contact for multiple days, right as a new dangerous virus with a long incubation period has been detected spreading from person to person.

You're speaking way beyond your purview. The CDC has already sprung into action: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2026/2026-cdc-provides-up...

It’s such a crazy world. Some days I can only deal with it with a big swig out of a whisky bottle and sarcasm.

Thank you for understanding me.

It's not that we don't understand you, but we want the wider world to maximally understand you loud and clear, now and always, without ambiguity.

Autism?

The post is unnecessarily political, and is written quite unclearly. The administration certainly will fund a new vaccine if the situation merits it.

The Covid mRNA vaccine, while lifesaving, is not without safety issues. It increases carditis risk substantially[1] (5x the baseline risk in males), and I personally experienced this effect for a month. It is best not to neglect such safety issues, ideally so they might be addressed in future protocols.

[1]: Risk for carditis tied to second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-carditis-tied-dose-pf...

No vaccine is without safety issues. That's why so much research has been done to evaluate the safety issues. The consensus conclusion is the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks in this age group, including because the risk of myocarditis or pericarditis is higher for those who get COVID. For examples more recent than 2022:

"Although our meta-analysis revealed a higher risk than previously reported of myocarditis/pericarditis attributable to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (among adolescent and young adult men), this does not negate the recommendation of COVID-19 vaccination for this population. Our previous study showed that the benefit of receiving the BNT162b2 vaccine or the mRNA-1273 vaccine was much higher than the risk of the vaccination across all age group and sex.59 Though the AR of myocarditis was assumed to be 12.1 per 100 000 for the primary series of the mRNA-1273 vaccine in men aged 18-29 years for the original benefit-risk calculations, if we updated the AR to 22.26 (2.84 after first doses plus 20.0 after second doses) per 100 000 for the primary series for men aged 18-24 years, based on the results of this current systematic review with meta-analysis, the benefits of vaccination would still far outweigh the risks in this age group." - Epidemiologic Reviews, 2025, 47, (1), 1–11 https://doi.org/10.1093/epirev/mxae007 Advance access publication date: December 13, 2024

"Compared with unvaccinated groups or unvaccinated time periods, the highest attributable risk of myocarditis or pericarditis was observed after the second dose in boys aged 12-17 years (10.18 per 100 000 doses [95% CI, 0.50-19.87]) of the BNT162b2 vaccine and in young men aged 18-24 years (attributable risk, 20.02 per 100 000 doses [95% CI, 10.47-29.57]) for the mRNA-1273 vaccine ... Young people’s risk of developing myocarditis is higher and longer lasting after covid-19 infection than after vaccination against it, the largest study of its kind suggests ... Over a six month period the researchers estimated that covid-19 infection led to 2.24 extra cases of myocarditis or pericarditis per 100 000 children and young people. This compares with 0.85 extra cases of myocarditis or pericarditis per 100 000 children and young people in those who were vaccinated." - BMJ 2025; 391 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r2330 (Published 05 November 2025)

The head of the Department of Health is solidly opposed to the development of vaccines. And the COVID mRNA vaccine increases carditis risk less than getting COVID without having had the vaccine does, and decreases the risk of severe carditis if you get COVID after the vaccine. So that's not a great argument against it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com