How Big of a Deal Is Hantavirus?

Plus: Teslas, China, ChatGPT lawsuit, and more…

Three passengers died of hantavirus, which is typically contracted via exposure to rodent droppings, urine, or saliva. The people who died all appear to have had the Andes variant, which spreads via human-to-human contact. Hantaviruses can cause either hantavirus pulmonary syndrome or hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome; the type currently spreading is the former.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is processing all 17 American passengers at a facility in Nebraska, but it’s not clear exactly what next steps look like—likely quarantine, since we know the disease’s incubation periods are rather long. One of the Americans brought home has reportedly tested “mildly positive” for hantavirus, according to HHS—which sounds insane, because being positive or negative for a virus is a binary. How can you be “mildly” positive? But I digress. Another American has developed symptoms. Both were transported aboard the same flight as the rest, but with additional containment measures in placed “out of an abundance of caution.” I’d argue we need even more caution, and that there has not been an abundance of it, if the goal is to actually contain this terrible Andes variant and prevent further spread.

Here’s why: We’re getting more indications that there is asymptomatic spread. And that—coupled with a super-long incubation period—might create big problems.

That said, I won’t tell you to worry or not to worry. It is possible this could snowball and become a bigger problem. It is also possible that our public health authorities learned shockingly little from COVID, and are poorly equipped to handle pandemics, and that this won’t be the big one but that there’s no capacity to handle the big one whenever it comes. It is also possible cruise ships are cursed, even the classy ones.

Scenes from Austin: Does anyone have an estimate of how much of Austin’s vehicle traffic is self-driving? I’m back home visiting my family right now, having been away for the past year, and the proliferation of Waymos and Teslas is awesome to behold.

A small anecdote for the Elon haters: My mom just had her car totaled by some dunce and replaced her old car with a Tesla. She was backing out of the driveway over the weekend while my 3-year-old was riding his bike and I reflexively called him over to me, so he wouldn’t be anywhere near the car. But then it dawned on me that, with a self-driving Tesla, we have additional safety mechanisms built in; the perennial parental worry that a child will be hit by a car backing out could blessedly disappear as more and more people use full self-driving. I’m into it!

QUICK HITS

• President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet in Beijing this week, with Taiwan, tariffs, and Iran on the agenda. Also: the fate of Hong Kong democracy activist Jimmy Lai.
• “OpenAI is being sued by the family of a victim killed in the April 2025 mass shooting at Florida State University that left two people dead. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI’s ChatGPT enabled the attack,” reports NBC. “The complaint also names Phoenix Ikner, the man accused in the shooting, as a defendant, citing his ‘extensive conversations’ with ChatGPT. The suit says that OpenAI failed to effectively detect a threat in ChatGPT’s conversations with Ikner, claiming the chatbot ‘either defectively failed to connect the dots or else was never properly designed to recognize the threat.'”
• Lol:

Associate Editor, Reason

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