Hantavirus panic? Americans are more likely to die from a lightning strike

As headlines surrounding hantavirus continue to spark fear of another pandemic, BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler is urging Americans to take a breath and look at the actual numbers.

While the virus carries a frighteningly high fatality rate for those infected, Wheeler argues the odds of even contracting hantavirus remain astronomically low compared to everyday risks Americans routinely ignore.

“So, here are your odds of dying from hantavirus: 1 in 30 to 35 million,” Wheeler begins. “That’s your odds of dying from the hantavirus. You can compare that, and I suggest you do, to your odds of dying from being struck by lightning: 1 in 15 to 20 million. So, you are more likely to die from being struck by lightning in the United States than you are to die from the hantavirus.”

“Your odds, by the way, of dying in a car accident: 1 in 8 to 9,000. Your odds of dying from a medical error: 1 in 1,000 to 1,400. By the way, dying from a medical error is the third leading cause of death in our country after heart disease and cancer,” she continues.

“If someone is telling you to be frightened of the hantavirus, they are lying to you. If someone is telling you to be more worried about a 1 in 30 to 35 million odds chance of dying from the hantavirus while ignoring the approximately 350,000 people in the United States who die from a medical error from doctors messing up every year, you should mute them,” she adds.

While the fatality rate for hantavirus is high, the amount of cases per year in the United States is not.

“There’s an average of 30 cases of hantavirus per year that result in approximately 8 to 12 deaths per year. So, that is a case fatality rate, by the way, that’s extremely high. That’s 35 to 38% case fatality rate, which is a frightening statistic,” Wheeler says.

Hantavirus cases also historically mostly occur in a concentrated region, with 94% of the cases occurring west of the Mississippi River.

“They all happen around spring cleaning time when people in the Southwest, you know, clean out a shed that has the feces of the deer mouse, for example. That’s where the deer mouse is, in the Southwest. The dust, they inhale the dust, and they contract the hantavirus from it,” Wheeler explains.

Patient zero on the cruise ship also happened to put himself in a dangerous situation before contracting the virus.

“Before he boarded the cruise ship, [he] visited a dump, a landfill, that was contaminated with rodent feces. He went there, as an ornithologist might, to bird watch, despite the fact that local residents avoided the area because they knew it to be contaminated,” Wheeler says.

“They knew it to be dangerous to health. He did this anyway,” she continues, pointing out that while it may sound harsh, it was his decision.

“We should have societal recognition of decisions made by individuals that are bad decisions. For example, … this man died, and so maybe people don’t want to talk about his decisions because he’s dead, but are we avoiding the personal responsibility entirely?” Wheeler asks.

“He did something unwise. He did something imprudent. He hurt himself. He hurt his wife,” she says, “He hurt other people.”

And while there has been speculation that it’s a new strain, Wheeler explains that “it is not a new strain.”

“Has the virus actually mutated?” she asks. “Well, according to the science, according to an analysis of what the DNA looks like, the answer to that is no. In fact, it’s very, very similar to the strain of hantavirus that caused an outbreak in Argentina in 2018.”

“That is not a new strain,” she adds.

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