The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have issued a message to the public as more than a dozen of the Americans who were trapped on a cruise ship with a deadly disease return to US soil.At least one of the American passengers who disembarked on the island of Tenerife, Spain, for their return flight on Sunday night is known to have hantavirus. Two flew home in a biocontainment unit on the plane.Authorities stated that this was due to ‘an abundance of caution’, with one person testing positive for the fatal virus and another showing mild symptoms. But with Covid ravaging the world so recently, some have expressed fears that this could spark a new pandemic.The acting director of the CDC, Jay Bhattacharya, spoke to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday to address people’s concerns that returning passengers could cause an outbreak.

The infectious diseases chief said: “This is not COVID, Jake, and we don’t want to treat it like COVID.”he current outbreak involves a handful of cases of individuals infected with a bug known as the Andes virus, the only form of this deadly hantavirus that can spread from animals to humans. Its fatality rate can be as high as 50 percent.hattacharya went on to say: “We don’t want to cause a public panic over this. We want to treat it with the hantavirus protocols that we – that, again, were successful in containing outbreaks in the past. And so we followed those protocols.”This health alert is coming up because, again, there’s this discrete event of the 17 arriving in the United States very, very soon. And so we just want to make sure that the medical community understands this.”The 17 Americans returning home from the plague stricken cruise ship will not be returning to their homes, instead, they will be flown directly to Nebraska and taken to the National Quarantine Unit for further assessment.