'Serious disease': Hantavirus less infectious than COVID, yet has significant fatality rate - 1 in 3
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Issued on: 13/05/2026 - 09:27Modified: 13/05/2026 - 09:30
ShareAnnette Young is pleased to welcome Matt McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. As health authorities race to contain an emerging cluster of hantavirus infections, McKee offers a measured but sobering assessment of the risks, and the lessons the world should have learned from COVID. He warns that hantavirus is “a serious disease” with “a fatality rate of about one in three,” McKee is careful to distinguish it from the coronavirus pandemic, stressing that “it does not spread at anything like the rate that COVID does.” Yet he warns that an unusually specific chain of exposure, from rodent-contaminated landfill sites to what he calls “an institutional amplifier”, aboard a confined vessel, created “a very unusual set of circumstances” for transmission.
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