passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship where the hantavirus outbreak first occurred finished their isolation periods this past Sunday. This is a public health success story worth celebrating, because so many worse results were possible. We heard so much about what went wrong during Covid and the various systems that failed, so it’s good to recognise when things go right – even if you won’t hear about it in the evening news.

There were 147 passengers and crew, and on 4 May seven cases of respiratory illness on board were identified as the Andes strain of hantavirus, which has been known to spread from human to human. This was already an extremely unlucky outcome – hantavirus is deadly, with death rates approaching 30% based on recent research, but most strains only spread from animals to humans.

Given the long incubation period of the virus (as much as six to eight weeks), there was concern about how to manage the spread for those on the ship, as well as those who had already left on commercial flights before the outbreak was identified. The 23 nationalities of people involved made this even trickier to manage: which government would take responsibility and who would be in charge?

The worst-case scenario was terrifying. Imagine that the virus wasn’t identified quickly enough. In........

© The Guardian