Did you see a tweet from Polymarket that a suspected hantavirus case has been reported involving a high school student in New York? It’s technically true. But there’s more to the story and no reason for Americans to freak out about this particular case.
Many people around the world are on edge after hantavirus infected at least 11 people on a cruise ship, killing three. American passengers returned to the U.S. this week and are currently at a quarantine facility at the University of Nebraska Medical Center where they’ll be monitored for over a month, according to NPR.
The people aboard the MV Hondius who have tested positive for hantavirus all have the Andes virus, which is the only type of hantavirus known to be transmissible between humans. The more common forms of hantavirus all need to be contracted through direct contact with rodents. And that’s what appears to have happened in New York.
Kate Ott, public health director in Ontario County, New York, told ABC 13 that the suspected case of hantavirus in that area is someone who has been sick for a few weeks and is experiencing fatigue, achiness, and lethargy. The case is considered mild and it has no known connection to the cruise ship that everyone is concerned about.
“The hantavirus that occurs in the U.S. is not spread person to person,” Ott said, according to ABC 13. “It is spread between mice and humans. If I have it and I sneeze on you, you’re not going to get it.” Ott says a sample from the high school student has been sent to the CDC for confirmation.
The world is naturally on edge about the emergence of hantavirus as something that can spread person-to-person, since we can all remember the Covid-19 pandemic that started in 2020. But there are a number of different reasons that health experts are less concerned about hantavirus. For starters, it’s not a novel virus. It’s rare, but there’s no evidence that this is something genuinely new, as was the case with Covid-19.
Health experts also claim that the Andes virus is difficult to contract from another person, requiring close contact and transmission of droplets. But there are questions about how so many people on the ship were able to get hantavirus seemingly without direct contact. We don’t have solid answers for that yet.
Perversely, one thing that humanity may benefit from in this case is the high lethality of hantavirus. When you have a virus that kills quickly, it’s difficult for the virus to spread. Covid-19 could be mild enough in some people that it was able to spread far and wide, making people feel ill but not necessarily killing them. The most vulnerable people in society obviously paid a price for that, since the death toll globally from Covid is believed to be around 18 million, according to the Lancet.
Whatever you think about the likelihood of another pandemic (and, again, health experts say it’s unlikely here) it’s probably best to ignore whatever the Polymarket account on X is spreading. For whatever reason, Polymarket spreads some of the most sensationalist garbage on social media, which is doing nothing for the credibility of prediction markets.
Then again, Polymarket clearly has an incentive to confuse the internet about what’s going on. They need people to be betting on the least likely outcome in order to sell the dream of making it rich. The simple fact is that most people betting on prediction markets lose money, according to CNBC.
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