Hantavirus and passenger fleets: What passenger carriers should be thinking about

Three people are dead on a cruise ship anchored off Cape Verde, Africa. A 70-year-old Dutch man. His wife. A German national. All passengers aboard the MV Hondius, an expedition cruise ship that departed Ushuaia, Argentina, on March 20.

The cause is hantavirus, a family of viruses carried by rodents that has been tracked by the CDC since 1993, but has never been recorded on a cruise ship before. As of today, five cases are confirmed by testing, and three additional suspected cases are under investigation.

Health officials in at least a dozen countries, including the United States, are tracing passengers who disembarked at various ports before the outbreak was identified. Seventeen Americans remain aboard the vessel under what the operator Oceanwide Expeditions describes as strict precautionary measures.

Former passengers have been identified in Arizona, California, Georgia, Texas, and Virginia. NPR ran a headline today asking the question everyone is thinking: “Is hantavirus the next COVID?” The answer, based on what we know right now, is no. It is not, but that is the wrong question for passenger carriers to be asking. Hantavirus is not new.

CDC surveillance in the United States began in 1993 during an outbreak in the Four Corners region, where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. Between 1993 and 2022, the CDC documented 864 confirmed cases of hantavirus infection in the U. S.

During 2023 and 2024, more than 60 additional cases were reported across Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Washington, and California. The mortality rate for hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is approximately 38 percent. There is no vaccine. There is no specific antiviral treatment.

Early detection and supportive care improve outcomes, but one in three people who develop respiratory symptoms from hantavirus die from it. The virus spreads primarily through contact with infected rodents or their urine, droppings, and nesting materials. When those materials are disturbed, infectious particles can become airborne.

That is how most people get sick. You breathe it in. Human-to-human transmission is extremely rare. The World Health Organization notes that, when it does occur, it has been associated with close, prolonged contact, particularly among household members, intimate partners, and people providing medical care.

A 2020 study in the New England Journal of Medicine documented person-to-person spread during a 2018-2019 outbreak in Argentina among birthday party guests seated near each other. This is not an airborne respiratory virus that spreads through casual contact on a bus or in a terminal. This is not COVID. The transmission profile is fundamentally different.

Here is what passenger carriers need to understand. It does not matter whether hantavirus becomes a pandemic.

What matters is whether the next thing that does become a pandemic finds you with clean vehicles, a financial cushion, and a plan, because the motorcoach, airport shuttle, and rideshare industry already found out what happens when you do not have those things. In December 2019, there were 3,878 motorcoach carriers registered with FMCSA in the United States.

By early 2022, there were 1,940. Half the industry is gone. The American Bus Association documented that between 80 and 95 percent of motorcoach trips were canceled or simply not booked during the initial COVID shutdown. The industry lost $4. 8 billion in the first four months. The projected total of lost revenue through the end of the pandemic exceeded $10.

9 billion. Approximately 62,800 jobs were eliminated. The number of motorcoach drivers nationwide fell by 62 percent between February 2020 and December 2021. Congress approved a $2 billion grant program for motorcoach, school bus, and passenger vessel operators. The CERTS program required that at least 60 percent of the funds be allocated to payroll.

PPP loans kept some companies afloat temporarily. But many took on debt that they are still paying off today. Peoria Charter, one of the most recognized brands in the motorcoach industry, filed for bankruptcy in late 2025 specifically because a CARES Act loan it took in 2020 at 3. 1 percent was restructured to 8.

44 percent, making it impossible to repay within the five-year federal window. Coach USA, one of the largest operators in the country, completed its bankruptcy proceedings in August 2024, with its assets carved up and sold to affiliates of The Renco Group, AVALON Transportation, and Wynne Transportation.

These were not small operators running three buses out of a strip mall. These were major companies with decades of operating history. COVID did not just reduce their revenue. It eliminated their revenue model entirely. People stopped traveling. Period. While passenger carriers were bleeding out, property freight carriers were experiencing the opposite.

The COVID-era freight boom flooded the trucking market with volume. Stimulus checks. E-commerce. Supply chain disruptions created urgency and drove rates up.