The ECDC's May 22 update on the Andes hantavirus outbreak still reads 9 confirmed cases, 2 probable, 3 deaths — every one of them tied to the MV Hondius expedition cruise that docked in Rotterdam on May 18 and is now in port-side sanitation. [1] No new case, no new death, no port worker, hospital contact, or Rotterdam community case has emerged in the five days since the vessel reached the quay. The bounded-cluster verdict the WHO Disease Outbreak News DON-601 issued on May 13 has held through three editions of the surveillance log. [2]

The paper's Friday brief framed the cluster as the operating proof of the institutional discipline. Day three holds the frame. Spain's 42-day quarantine on repatriated passengers — set to the maximum Andes incubation period — runs to early July. South Africa's NICD has reported no secondary cases. A Canadian passenger who tested positive on Vancouver Island remains the one repatriation-surveillance hit; isolated, no chain. [3]

Andes virus is the only hantavirus known to transmit person-to-person, and even then only through close, sustained contact — the kind a shared cabin provides and a Rotterdam dockyard does not. The general-population risk has been assessed as low by both WHO and ECDC throughout. [1][2] The cluster the paper has been counting against the Bundibugyo PHEIC — one bounded, one not — is now five days into the same answer it gave on Day one: the procedure worked. The surveillance log will move only when a second jurisdiction's hospital does.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo