“Human-to-human transmission of hantavirus is extremely rare,” clarified the president of the EODY, Thodoros Vassilakopoulos.
As he explained, speaking on ERTnews’ Newsroom show,“for this to happen, two people need to be close for a prolonged period of time.”
However, he noted that “it has nothing to do with the contagiousness of coronavirus, influenza or even measles.” “We need to understand that we are talking about a ship that has about 150 passengers and so far seven people have had symptoms. Therefore, if it was something so contagious, we would have even more people with symptoms,” he said of the cruise ship MV Hondius on which an outbreak of the disease has broken out.
He added that the European Centre for Disease Control has already sent a special scientist to the cruise ship in order to coordinate the tracking process even better.
Vassilakopoulos stressed that “we are not at risk of a pandemic“, adding that “in Greece every year since 2004, when we have been monitoring the disease, we have one or two cases. There was also a year when we had four cases of chantavirus infection.”
As for the Greek passenger on the cruise ship, he commented that “we don’t know yet if he lives in Greece or if he is a Greek living abroad (…) However, the World Health Organization will give us his contact details within the day.”
