The hantavirus outbreak isn’t being blamed on Asians, but AAPI communities are watching anyway

The hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship in the Atlantic unfolds against the backdrop of lingering COVID-era trauma in Asian American communities. The virus itself, however, carries no link to Asia.

The World Health Organization has confirmed three deaths and 11 cases tied to the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius, which departed Argentina on April 1 before the outbreak spread among passengers and crew. The outbreak involves the Andes hantavirus, which is associated with South America and distinct from kidney-affecting strains found in Asia, health experts said.

The pathogen’s name traces back to South Korea, where a related strain was first identified near the Hantan River following infections among more than 3,200 UN soldiers during the Korean War. Unfortunately, that naming convention reflects a pattern in which diseases tied to places or peoples can prime public blame, a concern that has led the WHO to discourage geographic and ethnic disease labels.

Federal officials have repeatedly told the public the current outbreak poses low risk. “We have this under control, and we’re not worried about it,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a briefing Monday. Dr. David Berger, an Australian physician who previously served as a ship doctor for Oceanwide Expeditions, the operator of the MV Hondius, told CNN the reassurances amount to “calm-mongering,” which he said echoes the early days of COVID-19. Memories of COVID-19 are, of course, still fresh, and the reassurances risk eroding public trust.

Those memories are particularly raw for Asian American communities. A Health Affairs analysis of national polling showed that during the early months of the pandemic, about six in 10 Asian Americans had seen others assign blame to people of their background for the coronavirus. More recently, Stop AAPI Hate’s May 2026 State of Hate report found that 49% of AAPI adults experienced a hate act in 2025, while an AAPI Data poll found that about six in 10 still consider race-based discrimination likely over the next five years.

So far, the latest outbreak has not produced a racialized blame narrative. The Andes strain originates in South America, the index case was a Dutch national and the cluster is geographically distant from Asia. These are structural facts that may make Asian scapegoating harder to sustain this time. However, the absence of overt scapegoating does not erase the underlying vulnerability.

Duke University English professor Priscilla Wald has described an “outbreak narrative,” the recurring way media and popular culture tell stories about disease emergence. Wald has argued that those stories can stigmatize groups, places, behaviors and lifestyles. That stigma has repeatedly landed on Asian Americans as supposed carriers of COVID-19, leaving the community watching recent developments carefully.

As Cecillia Wang of the American Civil Liberties Union put it in 2020, “History teaches us that the scapegoating of immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants is nothing new.”