Where should hantavirus cruise ship passengers quarantine? Experts are divided

Health newsWhere should hantavirus cruise ship passengers quarantine? Experts are dividedIt can take up to 42 days after exposure to the Andes hantavirus for symptoms to appear.Listen to this article with a free account00:0000:00Medical personnel escort U.S. passengers from the cruise ship MV Hondius to shuttles Monday at Eppley Airfield in Omaha, Neb. Nikos Frazier / Omaha World-Herald via Getty Images fileShareAdd NBC News to GoogleMay 12, 2026, 5:36 PM EDTBy Erika Edwards and Akshay Syal, M.D.Eighteen Americans are now in quarantine in two federal centers after having returned home from the MV Hondius cruise ship. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.How long they’ll stay in quarantine or where isn’t clear yet. Now that the passengers have had time to rest up, U.S. health officials are interviewing them to get a better sense of how close the American passengers may have been to infected people — and whether they have the resources, such as separate rooms, to quarantine safely at home.“We want to do this in the least restrictive way possible,” Dr. Brendan Jackson, acting director of the high-consequence pathogens and pathology division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a media briefing Monday. It can take up to 42 days after exposure to the virus for symptoms to appear. If passengers are allowed to leave the federal quarantine centers and stay home instead, they would need to be symptom-free. They’d also need to check in with local health officials regularly, Jackson said. The Andes strain is the only hantavirus that can spread from person to person. While there are some reports of people’s catching it through casual contact, most scientists that say it doesn’t spread easily and that there’s no clear proof that people are contagious before they have symptoms. “We have no evidence of sustained community transmission outside of close contact settings, no evidence of efficient air...