Responses to hantavirus must be sharper

This aerial view shows health personnel assisting patients onto a boat from the cruise ship MV Hondius, while stationary off the port of Praia, the capital of Cape Verde, on May 6, 2026. (Photo by AFP) Back in early 2020, the reports coming out of China about a new respiratory disease, which seemed to be spreading, didn’t seem to worry many people. And, frankly, the emergence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome affliction, which came to be known asCovid, took the medical world by surprise.

It quickly became apparent that one of the main vectors for the spread of the disease across the world was air travel. Hundreds of people jammed together for hours in an environment of close contact was a recipe for a perfect pandemic accelerant. That’s why we are concerned that it apparently took the South African authorities eight days to notify Airlink airline that one of its passengers – who had contracted hantavirus on a cruise liner and then been flown to Joburg on one of its aircraft – had died.

That has implications. That flight from St Helena carried 82 passengers and six crew members and all of them would have, to a greater or lesser extent, been exposed to the infected woman. All of them would have gone home, or to further destinations around South Africa or further afield – as the sick woman was attempting to do by boarding a KLM aircraft in Joburg to return home to Amsterdam.

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She was removed from the plane when she became critically ill and was later transferred to a nearby hospital,where she died. That the hantavirus is contagious enough to be transmitted in an enclosed environment like a plane may be indicated by the fact that one of the KLM flight attendants who interacted with the woman is now in hospital, too. Airlink’s planes are cleaned and disinfected daily but this one may already have made other flights. Even though experts say we are not facing another Covid crisis, we worry that our responses need to be sharper.

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