Good morning. The outbreak aboard the MV Hondius has brought on flashbacks of the early pandemic, but experts say hantavirus shouldn’t be confused for COVID-19 – more on that below, along with NATO’s war games and Telus’ new AI data centres. But first:

• Separatist leader accused of misusing Alberta electors list refuses to co-operate with investigators
• Canadians are filing for insolvencies at levels unseen in more than a decade
• Trump rejects the “garbage” Iran counterproposal on the latest peace deal

A strange illness spreads through a luxury cruise ship, infecting passengers trapped onboard while the vessel searches for somewhere to dock – you’d be forgiven if the current hantavirus outbreak is stirring up stressful memories of early-COVID days. “I absolutely get that feeling,” B.C. Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry said at a news conference on Sunday. When she first heard about the crisis on the MV Hondius, it “made my stomach clench.”

But public-health authorities insist there’s no reason to think we’re on the cusp of a new global pandemic. Hantavirus is “quite different” than the coronavirus, Henry said, and far more difficult to transmit between humans. “This is not another COVID,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus echoed on the weekend. “And the risk to the public is low. So they shouldn’t be scared, and they shouldn’t panic.”

Still, yesterday’s photos of the last evacuated passengers – bundled into full-body protective gear and breathing masks, hosed down with disinfectant by Canary Islands officials in hazmat suits – can make for anxious viewing. The cruise ship’s hantavirus outbreak has killed three people. There are at least six others with confirmed or suspected cases. Six Canadians who were aboard the Hondius are now quarantined in B.C. and Ontario; four Canadians on flights with confirmed cases are self-isolating in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. Here’s what else to know about hantavirus and the international effort to keep it contained.

The outbreak’s origins

Hantavirus may be uncommon, but this is not a brand-new pathogen: It was first reported during the Korean War, after more than 3,000 UN troops developed a mysterious disease. (Its name comes from the Hantan River that flows across the demilitarized zone where the soldiers were stationed.) In most cases, humans contract the virus by breathing in particles from the urine, droppings or saliva of infected rodents. Depending on the strain, the fatality rate can be as high as 50 per cent, after the illness moves from flu-like symptoms – fever, chills, body aches – to shortness of breath and lung failure.

Only one type of hantavirus has ever been shown to leap between humans – the Andes strain, endemic to South America, which lab testing confirmed is the same type that infected patients from the ship. It’s believed the first person to fall ill and later die on the cruise, a 70-year-old Dutch man, came in contact with the Andes strain before he boarded on April 1 in Ushuaia, the southernmost city on Earth.

The passenger and his wife “had been bird-watching – not normally considered a hazardous sport – at a landfill outside of Ushuaia, Argentina,” Jeanne Marrazzo, CEO of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told reporters last week. But local health authorities strenuously deny that the infection could have occurred there. They point out there hasn’t been a case of hantavirus in the region since 1996.

The next steps

Part of the challenge in charting this outbreak is that hantavirus has a long incubation period, with symptoms appearing as late as six weeks after exposure takes place. The Dutch couple first arrived in Argentina on Nov. 27, crossed the border with Chile on multiple occasions over the next few months, headed to Uruguay for two weeks in mid-March, then came back to Ushuaia a couple of days before the cruise departed. Argentina’s health ministry said investigation teams would trap and test rodents along the couple’s route to try to pinpoint the infection site.

That long incubation period is also why Hondius passengers face a quarantine of up to 42 days. At least, that’s the official WHO guidance, but Ghebreyesus acknowledged his organization cannot “force” its recommendations. Some countries, including France, Spain and Greece, insisted their evacuees will be subject to strict isolation. U.S. health officials are monitoring 18 passengers at medical facilities in Nebraska and Georgia, but gave no indication how long they’d need to stay. “We have this under control,” U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy said at the Oval Office. “We’re not worried about it.”

B.C.’s Bonnie Henry wasn’t quite so blasé in yesterday’s news conference, though she once again noted that hantavirus doesn’t spread the same way as COVID-19. This virus sheds less easily, mutates less quickly, and burrows more deeply into the lungs, making it much harder for humans to pass along the illness. So far, the cases appear to be confined to people who were in close, sustained contact on the ship.

Henry said the Canadian passengers – none of whom has yet shown symptoms – will be reassessed after 21 days to see if their quarantine should be extended. This is still a “very critical stage of the incubation period,” she told reporters. But it’s also “a virus we know” and “is not a disease of pandemic potential.”

The war in Ukraine is increasingly dominated by air, ground and sea drones – and NATO forces are scrambling to catch up on this new type of conflict. Read more here about their drills in Latvia from The Globe’s Mark MacKinnon.