Hantavirus comes home: what American employers need to know

The risk to the broader public, health authorities are emphatic, is low. “We do know that you can get small clusters of disease, but in 30 years we’ve never seen any large outbreaks,” Khan told NPR. “This is unlikely to become a pandemic.”

For American employers and HR professionals, however, the situation asks a specific and practical question: when a deadly, slow-incubating infectious disease starts dispersing into the American workforce — across multiple states, with no symptoms and no test that can confirm exposure before illness — what exactly is your organization supposed to do?

What the Andes strain is, and why it is unusual

Hantavirus is not unfamiliar on American soil. From 1993 through 2023, the CDC recorded 890 laboratory-confirmed cases in the United States, caused mainly by the Sin Nombre virus, which spreads through contact with infected deer mice and is concentrated in the rural Southwest and Great Plains. It does not pass between people.

The Andes virus is different in one critical respect: it is the only hantavirus documented to transmit between humans. That transmission remains rare and demands prolonged, close physical contact with a symptomatic person — sharing a bed, intimate contact, or sustained proximity in caregiving. It is emphatically not airborne in the way influenza or Covid-19 are.

“This is a very different virus,” Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO director for epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, told a news briefing last week. The disease cannot spread through a shared elevator or an open-plan office.