As of May 11, 17 Americans who were on the hantavirus-plagued cruise ship MV Hondius have arrived in the U.S. and will be quarantined for at least a couple of weeks in Nebraska.
According to NBC affiliate WOWT-TV in Omaha, “A State Department flight carrying them landed at Omaha Eppley Airfield in Nebraska at about 2:30 a.m. ET on May 11, and buses containing the passengers arrived at around 6:15 a.m. ET at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which houses the National Quarantine Unit.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has said that two of those passengers were separated from the other passengers in the aircraft’s “biocontainment units.” Why? “Out of an abundance of caution.”
I’m sorry, but that last phrase gives me COVID-19 mismanagement vibes and makes my skin crawl. We heard that term used to explain and defend every major logic crime that happened during the pandemic.
HHS reported, “One passenger currently has mild symptoms and another passenger tested mildly PCR positive for the Andes virus.”
The next steps are for the passengers to be airlifted to the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center (RESPTC) at the University of Nebraska Medical Center/Nebraska Medicine in Omaha. The passenger who is already exhibiting those mild symptoms will go to another RESPTC.
About that acronym: Throw in an “E” and you get one of the greatest songs of all time sung by Aretha Franklin. Without that “E” you get a federal bureaucracy that is fully capable of screwing this thing up.
All of the American cruise ship passengers will go through a full examination and “receive appropriate care and support based on their condition,” added HHS.
If you haven’t heard, the hantavirus is a deadly virus most often contracted when one is directly exposed to rodent droppings. This rare Andes strain makes it possible for humans to contract the virus from other humans. Complicating this is the fact that its incubation period is pretty long. You can go weeks without symptoms, and then it hits you. This lends itself to more cavalier behaviors on the part of patients and health providers during the asymptomatic incubation phase.
In a statement, the CEO of Nebraska Medicine, Dr. Michael Ash, said, “We are prepared for situations exactly like this... Our teams have trained for decades alongside federal and state partners to make sure we can safely provide care while protecting our staff and the broader community.”
Okay, Dr. Mike, you’re on. The whole world is watching you and counting on you. Don’t mess this up. You have one job.
One group we are not counting on to do anything right, ethical, or in our best interest is the World Health Organization (WHO). Still, the WHO is the central clearinghouse for information on the situation. The WHO reports that it first learned of the outbreak on May 2, when a number of people came down with severe respiratory illness aboard that ship, which carried 147 passengers and crew.
Prior to this, and this could be a problem, 34 passengers and crew had previously disembarked. The WHO reported, “As of 8 May, a total of eight cases, including three deaths (case fatality ratio 38%), have been reported. Six cases have been laboratory-confirmed as hantavirus infections, with all identified as Andes virus (ANDV).”
Still, for what it’s worth, the WHO said that the risk to the global population as a result of this outbreak is very low, and the risk for passengers and crew who were on the ship “is considered moderate.”
The WHO recommends that anyone who’s been exposed to the virus be actively monitored for 42 days after they were last exposed.
For background, the other countries that are charged with monitoring and quarantining ship passengers who were exposed include Spain, Switzerland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. A couple of these countries may inspire confidence, but a few others are not reassuring, to say the least.
How the left would exploit a death
So what do you want to do while we wait to get the all-clear on the Americans involved? I’ve got an idea. How about we contemplate exactly what the left is doing right now in its sick and twisted war rooms?
You guessed it: If someone dies, it will give the left a new narrative to use to bash the Trump administration in the run-up to the midterms.
All they need is one death, the Democrat strategists feel. “Just give me one dead hantavirus victim in America,” the left is saying. “And I can do a lot of damage with that.”
What kind of damage can they do?
For starters, they can and will blame the Trump administration, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), HHS, and its cabinet secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and so many more. They can point to all of the cuts to the bureaucracy, waste, fraud, and corruption that President Donald Trump has made since returning to the White House in 2025. And they will use all of that to frame Trump and his administrators as bloodthirsty murderers.
They may even be conducting focus groups right now among their base and independent voters to see what messages would resonate and stick — but only if someone dies from the virus.
Slogans and chants are being tested. Protest signs are being printed and stored close to where the first protests would be held. Antifa is on notice and at the ready to cause all those “peaceful protests” that burn down cities, just in time for summer. Right on cue.
The plan would be to cause chaos, burn cities, and inspire people who don’t need much inspiration as it is to take to the streets, get in the face of police, blow whistles, break windows, loot, and burn things.
The inflammatory rhetoric that will drive all of this will sound familiar. Trump and the Republicans are an existential threat to our nation and our democracy. They’re killing people, and something has to be done.
In the end, that something will be to vote the Republicans out of the House and Senate, giving the Democrats a majority — but they can’t say it that way. It’s too clinical. They need to employ that thing they are so good at, and something my colleague Athena Thorne wrote about recently – stochastic terrorism.
She quoted a RAND report that thoroughly details what stochastic terrorism is:
Citizens are increasingly at risk to be exposed to extremist ideas through social media and communication apps, which can lead to a normalisation of hatred towards certain individuals, groups or institutions and an increased acceptance of violence…(Stochastic terrorism) refers to hostile, derogatory and/or dehumanising language by influential individuals towards a political, social, ethnic or religious group or individual. Through interaction on social media and traditional media, this language may lead to a climate of fear, which in turn increases the likelihood of someone turning to violence, even if the initial message does not explicitly call for it.
The left is more than capable of weaponizing that death to create chaos, possibly get other people killed, and try to pin all of it on Republicans so that they lose the midterms in the fall.
All they need is one American to die of hantavirus — something the Democrats, the party of death, would surely like very much.
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