Experts are relying heavily on a paper about superspreader events in Argentina to understand transmission dynamics of the Andes virus at the center of the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak.
In that paper, published in 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), spread was driven by three symptomatic people who attended crowded social events. All of them were in the prodromal phase of illness -- raising concerns that people may be at their most infectious early on in their disease.
The authors of the paper also warned that they believed the virus spread via airborne particles, not just droplets.
"On the basis of both the epidemiologic and genomic investigations of person-to-person transmission events, it appears that inhalation of droplets or aerosolized virions may have been the routes of infection," they wrote.
Some experts have been pushing to acknowledge that airborne transmission is likely in this case. Joseph Allen, DSc, MPH, of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, wrote in The Atlantic that public health officials "have to be more honest and more humble about how this virus actually spreads."
