90-Second Read: The system didn’t catch the Hantavirus threat. Biology saved us.

As of Monday, the World Health Organization had reported nine Hantavirus cases linked to the expedition cruise ship MV Hondius, with seven confirmed infections of the Andes strain and two probable infections. The first positive identification of Hantavirus infection among ship passengers was May 2, while the first death on the ship was April 11. Last year, Betsy Arakawa, wife of actor Gene Hackman, died from Hantavirus in her home in Santa Fe, briefly raising the alarm about a long-ignored threat. The cruise ship outbreak reveals how vulnerable the United States remains to infectious diseases despite lessons from COVID. The Andes strain is the one Hantavirus capable of spreading from person to person.

Passengers began falling ill weeks before Hantavirus was identified. Hantavirus became a nationally notifiable disease in 1995. The Trump administration has been making cuts over the past 15 months, not because health threats have diminished but because of its desire to undo the work of the Biden administration. If there were an outbreak of the Andes strain in rural Nevada or even Washington, D.C., would health officials know? It has a passive, symptom-triggered system that requires a sick person, an alert physician, and a correct diagnosis to register a single data point.

Jha served as White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator under President Joe Biden and is a physician and public health researcher. North America has its own strain, Sin Nombre (or Unnamed in Spanish), which is not known to spread between people. Our nation has built satellites and other surveillance systems because leaders decided that threat was worth watching. The gap Hantavirus is exposing is not about Hantavirus. As of April 24, 25 percent of the passengers had already disembarked.

The CDC's National Wastewater Surveillance System covers 145 million Americans weekly, but it is geographically incomplete, concentrated in urban counties, and designed around detecting a small number of well-known pathogens. Beyond wastewater, a true early warning system pairs environmental sampling with metagenomic sequencing capable of detecting pathogens before health officials know what to look for. By the time health officials understood what the world was facing, COVID was everywhere. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has lost more than 3,000 staff in the past 15 months. If it were in use today, health officials would know if the Andes strain was in the United States or not.