The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has classified the hantavirus outbreak as a “Level 3” threat and activated its emergency operations centers, according to a report.
The designation is the lowest level of emergency activation, signifying that the risk to the general public remains low — in line with information given by the World Health Organization earlier Thursday.
The CDC is actively monitoring the situation, including by activating the emergency centers, sources told ABC News Thursday.
This typically signals that a designated emergency team has been set up to handle hantavirus, the outlet reported. Epidemiologists, scientists and physicians may be reassigned to monitor and assist with the disease response.
Many small natural disasters in the US tend to involve Level 3 responses under the CDC’s Emergency Management Program.
The CDC said in a statement Wednesday it is “closely monitoring the situation with U.S. travelers onboard the M/V Hondius cruise ship with confirmed hantavirus.”
“The Department of State is leading a coordinated, whole-of-government response, including direct contact with passengers, diplomatic coordination, and engagement with domestic and international health authorities,” the statement added.
President Trump said he has been briefed on the hantavirus outbreak on the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius, which is en route to the Canary Islands and expected to arrive Saturday.
“It should be fine. We hope,” he told reporters while speaking about the outbreak. “It’s very much — we hope — under control.”
He confirmed that a “full report” will be issued Friday — but stopped short of providing the exact details on what it might feature.
Trump also tried to reassure Americans when asked if they should be worried about the outbreak.
“I hope not, I mean, I hope not,” he said. “We’ll do the best we can.”
State agencies are monitoring American passengers who were on board the ship and have since returned home.
The passengers did not know that they had been exposed to the virus when they left the boat at Saint Helena on April 24.
Texas said the two residents have agreed to monitor their temperature daily for possible infection — but they are not currently showing infection.
The two Georgia residents are in good health, showing no signs of infection and following recommendations from the CDC, the Peach State’s Department of Public Health said.
The Arizona passenger was not experiencing symptoms either, according to the state’s health services department.
The Virginia resident was “currently in good health” and being monitored, the Virginia Department of Health said.
Six Americans were among the 30 passengers who disembarked during the ship’s stop in Saint Helena, the vessel’s operator, Oceanwide Expeditions, revealed Thursday.
Hantavirus reached Europe earlier this week, with a man who had left the boat turning himself in to a Zurich, Switzerland, hospital after exhibiting symptoms.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has also activated its response regarding the Andes hantavirus outbreak, which carries a mortality rate of 40%.
Officials confirmed Wednesday that an EU Health Force Task official had been deployed to the cruise ship.
Similarly to its American counterparts, the ECDC has said the risk to the population is very low.
Three suspected hantavirus patients were evacuated from the MV Hondius while it was in West African waters, off the coast of Cape Verde, and are receiving treatment.
British former cop Martin Anstee, who now works as an expedition guide on the liner, was airlifted to an Amsterdam, Netherlands, hospital.
A 41-year-old Dutch national and a 65-year-old German national were removed from the ship alongside Anstee on Wednesday.
Eight suspected hantavirus cases have been reported, including three deaths, the World Health Organization confirmed.
But Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, said, “It’s possible more cases may be reported.”
A British man, 69, is being treated in a South African hospital, but the UK’s Health Security Agency announced Friday an additional suspected case of the virus on the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha.
The MV Hondius stopped briefly at the archipelago in mid-April.
Amazon Web Services said that recovery efforts are still underway after a "loss of power during a thermal event" disrupted a Northern Virginia data center on Thursday evening.
"Mitigation efforts remain underway to resolve the impaired EC2 instances and degraded EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone (use1-az4) in the US-EAST-1 Region," AWS wrote on its Service Health page, indicating that its operational issue for "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (N. Virginia)" remained "impacted" as of early Friday morning.
AWS shifted traffic away from the affected zone for most services and told customers to use other Availability Zones in US-EAST-1, noting that data centers in other zones were unaffected.
"The work to bring additional cooling system capacity online, which will enable us to recover the remaining affected infrastructure in a controlled and safe manner, is taking longer than we had initially anticipated," AWS stated.
The AWS disruption in Northern Virginia caused Coinbase's services to be affected overnight.
On May 7th Coinbase experienced service disruptions. Here’s a quick summary of what happened:
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) May 8, 2026
→ Around 8PM ET, Coinbase systems flagged high error rates across multiple services.
→ We traced these errors to amazon failures in Availability Zone (use1-az4) in the AWS US-EAST-1…
AWS did not provide details about what caused the "thermal event" at one of its data centers in Northern Virginia.
US prosecutors this year outlined a scheme in which Super Micro’s co-founder allegedly worked with an unnamed Southeast Asian company and a “rotating cast” of third-party brokers to divert the AI semiconductors in violation of US trade rules. The Southeast Asian firm the prosecutors didn’t name, identified only as Company-1, is Bangkok-based OBON Corp., the people said.
“There are Chinese aboard the vessel but no reported crew casualties so far,” China’s foreign ministry said.
A Chinese-owned oil products tanker was attacked near the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week, marking the first reported attack on a Chinese oil tanker since the conflict began.
According to Reuters, the vessel’s deck caught fire during the incident near the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Maritime security sources identified the ship as the Marshall Islands-flagged tanker JV Innovation.
“With this president and that idiot defense secretary, I think instead of USA we should say USI - United States of Idiots,” Rezaei wrote on X.
He also said US naval forces would not be able to pass through the Strait of Hormuz even “with the entire navy,” and accused Washington of acting “like a spoiled child.”
The comments came after clashes between Iranian and US forces following accusations by both sides of violating a month-old ceasefire linked to the war that began in late February.
