Hey, folks, it is Friday, May eighth. We've already got three dead. Now we have more suspected cases and more suspected places.
The CDC has upped its alert level.
But hey, doctors are saying, we got nothing to worry about in this hantavirus outbreak in the ocean.
And with that, welcome to this episode of Amy and TJ. Robes. Let's start there. Don't want to ever be accused.
Of being alarmist, but it seems every doctor we're hearing from, every doctor we read about and see on TV, all seem to be saying there is a low, low risk that this thing is going to turn into much more than it is now.
Is that fair? Yes?
In fact, we actually chuckled just listening to one doctor continue to repeat so far, so good, and we were laughing because, look, I think many of us are on edge a bit, just having emerged from the coronavirus pandemic. We've all gone back in our minds and remembered the early oh and not a big deal, nothing to worry about. And now you just hear doctors kind of saying the same thing, and we're not saying that it's anything to
worry about. It's just you start thinking, wow, well that sound by come back and bite him in the ass later, hopefully not.
Well. We said that about a lot of doctors.
They do seem it's almost and I'm not getting onto them road, but it seems like they're going out of their way to go the other way to tell everybody that this isn't a big deal, to the point that almost sounds ridiculous. It's almost like they're not taking into context our previous and very recent experience right right.
They need I want some validation here, Yes, I want some validation that I have every reason to be slightly nervous. Both of our daughters have texted us saying, I'm a little worried. You know, even kids are hearing this, and they lived through the pandemic, you know, so they don't have as much perspective. I think Sabine said, I'm going to go through two pandemics in six years of my thirteen years of life, and so from that perspective, you can see why a lot of people are on edge.
And then you hear the CDC is announcing a level three outbreak. You even said to me, what does that mean? So I looked it up look, level three is the lowest level, but it does mean that they have activated basically an emergency operations center surrounding the haunt of virus, so that is now official. We now have a level three outbreak that the CDC is monitoring. Level two is a moderate concern. Level one is the highest, and the pandemic, of course was level one.
But it probably started as a three.
So yes, now we have begun a level three outbreak according to the CDC. Which look, initially, when this thing started, what was it. I can't even remember when we first started talking about this Monday, was it over the weekend? But even you were like, eh, it's just a cruise ship, a couple people, just a minor outbreak. It didn't seemed like it was going to be much at all, and fully contained the ship.
It was so away from everything, like you said, fully contained. I think what was I'm not sure what it was. It turned around for me. I think when you started talking about the andes and human to human and this possibility, and certainly this woman had gotten off the plane certainly changed everything got off the boat. But she's not the
only one. We have learned so so much more so we want to give you an update about where we are, and the updates includes, First of all, you should know yes, there are five states in the US that are monitoring people who.
Got off that boat. Will give you the latest on that.
We still have the numbers of three dead, another five cases either suspected or confirmed, but robes the biggest concern, and some headlines here are about people who never set foot on the damn boat.
Yes, so this is what is concerning. This was the most concerning thing to me when I woke up this morning and saw that today this is the latest as of Friday, UK health authorities are saying a third British national is now suspected to have hantavirus. That British national lives in Tristan da Cunha. It's a remote British territory in the South Atlantic where the ship stopped. So this person was never on the cruise ship. This person lives in one of those remote islands who now has fallen
ill and is suspected to have hantavirus. Now, if this case is confirmed, this is deeply concerning because I'm just wondering how somebody who lives on the island got in close personal prolonged contact with someone on the ship who had hauntavirus.
Because Robes, that's one of the things they keep trying to calm us down about. They say, oh, we heard the World Health Organization representative speaking about this that it's not like is not like the flu and easily passed through a couple of droplets. He said, it has to be a longer, extended, even intimate contact. You could see a husband and wife around each other that long ropes. This gets my attention, And we don't know what. Maybe somebody on the ships dating somebody on the island. Yeah,
maybe it went out for dinner, maybe they hung. I don't know, but Robes, this is a pretty random thing. Given a lot of what we're saying about how difficult it's supposed.
To be for this to go from human to human.
You're going to start to hear more about this case because literally Friday today, and obviously they are ahead of us there in Great Britain, but this just got released, this information that they now think perhaps a British national in one of these islands has haunted.
How small as this island.
I don't know, but it's look, I traveled through some of this area let's just say it's the remotest place I've ever been to on Earth, so I can't imagine there would be a lot of people here. So that is the good news that it is isolated to this very isolated area. However, the bad news is the fact that this person could have contracted this and not have ever set foot on the boat, all.
Right, and that this isn't the only one, right, we had the other one was on the plane.
Is that correct?
Well, yes, the French citizen who is isolating right now, and we're confused what this means. But this person is showing what they're calling benign symptoms of the virus after being on the plane with the Dutch woman who later collapsed.
So that would make more sense, right if somebody that close proximity you could have been sitting next.
To you, that would make sense. She is being tested right now, And there was a flight attendant who fell ill in the Netherlands. She was rushed to the hospital. They just said that she tested negative for hauntavirus. But she was also on that plane, and right now Dutch public health officials are currently can you imagine this contacting contact, tracing all the passengers, I believe they say eighty people were on that flight from Saint Helena to Johannesburg, so
that's concerning. And then in addition, in Singapore, two men who were on that flight, who were on that cruise ship are now in quarantine and undergoing testing right now. I didn't see any word about their health. If Singapore is just doing this because they were on the ship and on the flight, or if they're exhibiting any symptoms unclear, but we're waiting for word on what their test results are as well.
Okay, I'm just keeping up with my numbers here. How is it two or three people who are now suspected or confirmed cases that were never on the ship? That two or three? There are one the British national on the island.
And then and then the French citizen. Okay, so too, all right, yes, because the right now the flight attendant apparently does not have hauntavirus. We're always a little suspicious too, having lived through COVID, you know how many times you could test negative and then test positive. So and they were. There was a growing sorry, a learning curve for even doctors epidemiologist on how this how the coronavirus was mutating, operating,
how to test for it all of that? Not sure if there are those same vague areas, but you would imagine there would be. This isn't a common strain of this virus that we didn't even know about until last year.
I wonder how much background they have on this virus if it was, you know, isolated to a remote area of the world, how much study, how much energy was put into this thing? Are we in a case where we have a brand new thing that they're trying to map out?
Are we?
I mean they're not starting maybe from the very beginning of the drawing board, but robes is this thing? How quickly How quickly did we know about strains of COVID? How quickly were we hearing we're dealing with this one? Now we're dealing with this one. I kind of remember, I mean, did we start out with just one strain? And was it more than one strain? I kind of remember. So we have this virus, this and these things are going to start doing weird stuff? Has it already done weird stuff?
This is the concern? And look, I actually we're gonna I'm gonna call my dad, who's a microbiologist later today and see, because I know he knows a lot about this type of thing. And I think we are at a point now where we need some experts, and we're hearing them on television, but we're and we're all hearing them give us perspective to not get alarmed, to not be concerned. But look, this is just the beginning, because there are still one hundred and forty six people that
I think we've finally got word. It's been confusing how many people are still on this ship. But the AP is reporting one hundred and forty six people from twenty three different countries, including seventeen Americans, are still on board
that ship. Okay, that ship is arriving in the Canary Islands around seven am Eastern time on Sunday, and the US right now says it is going to send a chartered plane with all of the necessary precautions to pick up those seventeen people and bring them back to the United.
States, where we'd all like to know where they're going to drive.
We all like to know who knows. I don't have that worry.
Maybe Atlanta, CDC down there, maybe DC that.
Would make the most sense to do something.
Either Walter Reid or somewhere affiliated with the CDC, seeing how they now have a devoted team solely now focusing on this hantavirus outbreak, So that supposedly is all happening in the next couple of days.
A lot of attention and focus is certainly going to be on that. But look, we still have those passengers who disembarked early on April twenty fourth. They went to twelve different countries. They went to the UK, the US, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, Turkey, Germany, Denmark, Saint Kitts and Nevis, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, and my favorite unknown. There are two passengers that they don't know what countries they went to. They just know that they left.
Do they know what countries they're from?
They only they just list an unknown and we have two passengers. That is certainly concerning. So for the perspective of this, health officials across four continents right now are scrambling to track down and monitor those passengers and trace all the people they came into contact with along the way before they were notified. So when we come back, we are going to talk about the five states here in this country who are now monitoring those passengers.
And.
Welcome back everyone to this episode of Amy and TJ, where we are yes talking about the level three outbreak deemed by the CDC, the hauntavirus outbreak and what that means and what is happening right now because this information is rapidly changing. But right now we know that there are five states in this country free monitoring known passengers who disembark from that cruise ship and now are trying to find all the people they came into contact with, me.
Six or seven states, given those two unknowns, it's unknown.
I hate that. How do they not know either where they're from, where they were headed?
How do you not know who's on you a passenger on the ship? Unknown? You know what I prefer they just left that information.
They just write refuge as theirs their place of origin. Obviously everyone had to have a passport. So that's confused.
It's not a cheap.
Trip, it's not it's not okay outside that unknown. I just leave that off. Don't even tell me that.
Concerning all right, So we'll start in Virginia because they have one This is also slightly confusing, one resident who they say is currently in good health that they are monitoring and then they say there are fewer than five potentially exposed Virginians who might be identified in the days ahead. I quote to them, that's what the Virginia Public Health Office release.
We were screaming at the TV watching the representator from Virginia Health Department do an interview yesterday. We couldn't figure out. We didn't understand they're monitoring a person. He literally said, yeah, we call, we text them, check in every day.
And he's not isolating. Yeah, so I was concerning.
Well, they didn't ask and they didn't get a claranza here robes on. Is this person allowed to just go walk around with the general population until they have symptoms?
That's what it sounded like to me. The person who was the representative of the Virginia Office of Public Health was a physician and said that until a patient or a person starts exhibiting symptoms of the Haunt of virus, which is I guess a flu like symptoms, they're not contagious. But that's really alarming, because where are you going to be when you start developing symptoms if you should or would eventually develop symptoms. I'm just going to have my first knees.
Where for babe, that's not an exact science. The symptom, is it a slight headache that I am now contagious or not until I have a full headache and a running nose and aches?
How extreme do the symptoms need to be? Can it come on?
Can I be contagious like ten minutes before the symptoms come too?
That's too fine a line. Ro hoops.
I Actually we were shocked. Our jaws dropped when we heard that the person who was on this ship, who was on the ship after someone already died on the ship from a virus, a deadly virus that passes from human to human, is allowed to freely walk around Virginia until they developed symptoms.
It sounded like it maybe maybe this person is voluntarily staying at home.
Maybe that's the case.
But he did not make it sound like they were making sure this person was not out.
They call them, they text.
He literally said, we text and check in every day just to see how they're doing.
God.
He did say that this person takes their temperature twice a day.
Yes, okay, I.
Think he also didn't say that person was very much wanting to stay in touch with them as well.
Well.
Obviously that person's very concerned. I'm sure it is probably taking their temperature ten times a day, because you know you would be if you had been on that ship. Texas, two individuals who were on this ship are now being monitored. They didn't have contact with a sick person and are not currently reporting symptoms. So that's what we got from Texas. Georgia has two residents also under observation. They say that
neither has shown any symptoms. In Arizona there is one person being monitored who was also asymptomatic, and in California this is another. They're very vague. They are monitoring what they have described as an undisclosed number of people, but no information suggests they are ill or infected.
Why would they say that.
I don't know. I don't know why they won't give us a number.
That is that their wording, that's their warding.
They just said residents. They just had al so there was no number associated with it. I don't know why there's been no follow up or any specification as to how long or how many.
The story keeps.
You and I said, it robes if if we hear that someone is in New York, it ups the conversation a little bit, but really we know what that was like. No, not just us, he's living here. Yes, we went through this thing, but the country watched us be an epicenter of something.
Because of how we live. We are on top of each other.
Shared airspace in apartment buildings, and yes, so it's a completely different situation if you've got one of these folks coming back to an urban area. Yeah, it was a dense urban area.
We hear about somebody being monitored in New York. You say, on top of each other. I think how many times in my life growing up I had to get on an elevator. Seriously, robes, We're on an elevator in an enclosed space with someone several times a day. Strangers is uber like. People don't live like that the rest of the world. You're on one level. You're not going that's we I just thought about that. We are packed in together constantly in robes. No, COVID scared the hell out
of us for a long time. We have the handle and understand it now, but we don't understand this thing, but we understand numbers robes. We have not in our lifetime dealt with something that kills forty percent of the people it infects.
No, that is frightening.
That's movie shit, that is terrifying. So they can tell us all day long, robes at the risk is low, but we are still shell shocked. And I hate using this word, it's overused, but this is triggering.
Yes, it is a lot of us, absolutely all this one.
So that's why we want to keep these updates coming. And they really this is changing almost every hour it is.
And there are right now. I just want to say, in Argentina, right now they are testing rodents in the areas of Schwa but also just where this Dutch couple went. They really do believe that these were the folks who brought this inadvertently onto this ship. They were on a bird watching trip that went through Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and so they're trying to retrace this couple's steps to see where they went and where they could possibly have picked
up this deadly strain of this rare virus. So that is what's happening right now in Argentina. They are trapping and testing rodents in the area to try and make sure this does not go any further than it already has. But we will continue to monitor this rapidly developing story. As always, we appreciate you listening to us. Everyone, I'm Amy Robach alongside TJ. Holmes. We'll talk to you soon.