90-Second Read: CDC's acting director says Hantavirus is not "a five-alarm fire bell"

Jay Bhattacharya, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CBS News that the Hantavirus outbreak should be treated differently from COVID. Bhattacharya, who also leads the National Institutes of Health, said Hantavirus "is a more deadly disease if you get it," but added that the "epidemiological risk is very, very different" than COVID. According to health officials, the Hantavirus outbreak identified on the cruise ship is the Andes strain of the virus, which can spread between people but requires prolonged close contact with someone who is ill. It's very different than COVID, and we should treat it differently than COVID," Bhattacharya told "CBS Evening News" anchor Tony Dokoupil on Monday when asked about the lack of daily briefings on the outbreak. There have been at.

Schumer, a Democrat from New York, called the decision "incompetence." "The very CDC inspectors and port health workers we need to track this virus, the people whose entire job is to keep deadly diseases off cruise ships and out of our country, Donald Trump fired them. They have made it impossible to find out," Schumer said in a statement Sunday. Of course, any time so many people are traveling, there's always the possibility of various outbreaks or whatnot to happen. But the risk is not any different than it is in other World Cups that we've managed properly. And the United States has systems in place to make sure that if something happens that we respond appropriately.

Unlike COVID, the way that people get it from person to person is much, much more difficult for that to happen," he said of the way the virus spreads. On communicating the potential danger to the public, Bhattacharya said the CDC does not want to cause unnecessary panic. The key thing is that we should be keeping the public aware of when there's actually threats to them, not causing the public to panic, not speculating about things that haven't happened, or potentially could in some universe happen. This White House will tell you the risk to Americans is low.