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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Is Hantavirus that much of a big deal? There were a bunch of scares, Nipah and Marburg and monkeypox and H5N1 that turned out to be not such a big deal. Everyone is just a bit scared since COVID and so the media will amp that right up.

I know degens on 4chan have already anthropomorphized and sexualized the hantavirus like COVID before that but we should probably be fine? They panic about everything, real or imaginary.

Nevertheless anyone who comes down with a novel strain of disease should be strictly quarantined IMO, not flown around the world to max out infectivity.

If you get hantavirus it's a huge deal. But you won't get it. It just doesn't spread that easily among humans. "There are hantavirus cases!" has been true (nearly?) every year, in the continental US; this one is just special because it was in sufficiently cramped conditions that it infected more than just like one guy sweeping up contaminated mouse droppings without an N95.

https://www.nmhealth.org/data/view/infectious/890/

It's also Andes virus, a strain known for human-to-human transmission, rather than the North American Sin Nombre virus, which is not. (It's called Sin Nombre because two proposed names based on where it was first found didn't pass political muster)

That's an important distinction, but it looks like the resulting epidemiology still isn't much different? Wiki claims the Andes strain is about 1/6 of the human hantavirus cases in Argentina, which would mean it's been responsible for roughly a couple dozen cases a year since the mid-90s. Having a dozen cases in the same cruise ship is creepy, and maybe it means this'll end up on the list of otherwise-obscure diseases that turn into serious risks in crowded semi-confined ship/barracks/dorm conditions, but it still doesn't look like the "first zoonotic/lab-leak appearance in humans, followed by exponential doubling in the general population every few weeks" we saw from Covid.

Is Hantavirus that much of a big deal?

No.

Among other things it has a much smaller window of H2H transmission.

odds are it's not a big deal. It's not nearly as contagious of Covid.

If you mean that literally: what odds do you have in mind?

polymarket is giving a 9% odds of pandemic in 2026. I would put my odds closer to 1-2%. Unlike Covid, it's not spread through breathing. it requires exposure to fecal matter

How could it become a pandemic, then? Do you give it 1-2% chance because of the chance it could mutate? (Or already did mutate, we just don't know it yet)

That is why the odds are not zero. 2% seems right for tiny possibility of mutations or unforeseen

There was the time I cleaned out a closet full of dead mouse bodies without a mask, and then people said: you shouldn't do that, mouse droppings carry diseases! I have now mildly updated towards not doing that in the future.

That’s been common advice for voles locally for decades because the only native hantavirus is transmitted by vole droppings. It isn’t deadly but can be nasty, particularly if you have any kidney issues and applying basic precautions is so easy that you’d have to be a stupid not to take them (ie. wear a mask).

This isn't even a novel hantavirus. It's Andes strain.

As we all know, no virus that is slightly transmissible between humans could ever mutate to become more transmissible between humans.

Or a virus that's slightly harmful to humans could mutate to become more deadly. As has happened. If you worry about all of the possibilities, you'll never stop worrying.

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