Third Ontario resident in isolation due to hantavirus is Peel Region resident

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A third Ontario resident now in isolation because of the hantavirus is in Peel Region, Health Minister Sylvia Jones confirms.

Ontario health officials said Friday that two people from the same household were isolating in the Grey-Bruce counties area. Jones said that couple continues to be asymptomatic.

Federal health officials said Friday a third person from Ontario may have had brief contact with a confirmed case on a flight, but did not specify where in Ontario they were from.

“The couple in Gray-Bruce absolutely is still self-isolating. They continue to be asymptomatic and obviously the local public health unit is monitoring closely,” Jones said Monday. “We do have a third individual in the Peel Region who is also isolating and being monitored by the local public health unit.”

Health officials have said that hantavirus, a rare, but sometimes deadly disease, does not spread easily from person-to-person. According to the World Health Organization, the disease is usually spread through contact with the urine, feces or saliva of infected rats.

So far, an outbreak associated with an Atlantic cruise ship, the MV Hondius, has resulted in eight cases, including three deaths.

Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti, an infectious diseases specialist at Trillium Health Partners in Mississauga, told CTV News Monday it’s important to distinguish between those who are being monitored for symptoms and those who have actually become ill.

“These people, it’s very important to say that they’re not individuals who are having symptoms, necessarily. They’re being monitored if they develop symptoms. And this is exactly what the protocol entails,” Chakrabarti said.

Ontario health officials have previously said they have received best practices from Argentina around possible incubation periods for hantavirus since that country has more experience dealing with the virus and plan to monitor contacts for 45 days.

“We have to also remember that this is a relatively rare type of infection, so we are still learning from it,” Chakrabarti said. “And when you have such a long incubation period, you have to be careful that you have to watch people for the entire time.”

But he emphasized that even if the virus is able to spread from person-to-person, “it’s not like COVID” in terms of the ease of transmission.

“Most of the other hantaviruses do not transmit from person to person. This strain just happens to,” Chakrabarti said. “It looks like the viral sequence of this (strain), the DNA sequence is pretty much the same. It’s a little bit different, but I’m not worried about this really changing, in a major extent, turning into something like a pandemic virus.”

He described the outbreak associated with the MV Hondius as occurring from a “perfect storm” of circumstances and doesn’t see it as a failure of the system.

“We know that these types of things exist in the environment,” Chakrabarti said, noting that in part that’s why epidemiology exists.

“If anything, they were able to identify it fairly quickly once they saw two deaths on the ship. But again, these things happen sporadically. That’s why we study them.”