Here’s the CDC’s plan as hantavirus-hit cruise starts evacuation process

A cruise ship carrying more than 140 passengers, including over a dozen Americans, started evacuations on Sunday following a hantavirus outbreak that has claimed three lives so far.Passengers wearing protective gear started disembarking in small boats after the cruise ship anchored off Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands. Authorities said there would be no contact with the local population. Those departing were told to leave behind their luggage and only take essential items.In a press release on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that a team of epidemiologists and medical professionals was deployed to the Canary Islands to conduct exposure risk assessments for each American passenger and provide monitoring recommendations.The agency said those individuals would be evacuated on a U.S. government medical repatriation flight and transported to the National Quarantine Center at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.No one on board is currently showing symptoms, but five passengers who previously left the ship have been infected with hantavirus.Emily Hilliard, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the CDC is coordinating with state and local authorities to ensure that exposed Americans “are being appropriately monitored and following best practices based on their exposure risk.”Hantavirus usually spreads when people inhale contaminated residue of rodent droppings, but experts say it can be transmitted between people in rare cases with prolonged, close contact. The CDC says that the risk to the American public remains “extremely low” at this time.”Hantavirus is not set up to cause a pandemic the way that COVID was, at this point, and there’s nothing to suggest that it is on the way to doing that,” former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden told CNN in an interview on Friday.Still, Frieden said that the CDC’s response has been too slow, from the dispatching of disease investigators to health alerts to doctors. One such alert was released on Friday, but the concerns follow sweeping staff cuts under the Trump administration.”We, in this country and around the world, are much less safe because the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been hollowed out. We have left the World Health Organization, and we are vulnerable to threats because we don’t have these basic defenses,” Frieden said.The World Health Organization has been out front on the hantavirus response. It made the assessment that informed the public that the outbreak was not a pandemic threat. For decades, the CDC partnered with the WHO in situations like this and spearheaded international investigations.The New York Times reported that the CDC set up a team to respond to the outbreak this past Tuesday, or nearly a month after the first patient had died.Asked about that timeline, Hilliard said the Trump administration has been “tracking this incident since its start.””The U.S. Government is deeply committed to the health and safety of its citizens,” Hilliard wrote. “For several days, the U.S. Government has been in contact with Americans on the ship to ensure they are appropriately assessed and healthy.”Asked on Friday if he would reconsider his decision to leave the WHO in light of the hantavirus outbreak, President Donald Trump told reporters, “No, we seem to have things under very good control. They know that virus very well. It’s been around a long time.”