The Brief

Around five years ago, when Micah Mumper relocated from New York to Long Beach where he knew no one besides his wife, he found himself, as he puts it, in a funk.

“Depression would be the emotion,” said Mumper, 33, who moved to the area for a job. “It was kind of a dark place — not a very fun place.”

While he had a brother he saw occasionally nearly 40 miles away in Orange County, he and his wife fell into a rough pattern that would last for several years.

They hardly left the house or interacted with anyone besides each other, he said, and generally lacked motivation to do basic things like clean up after themselves.

“We were just sort of going through the motions,” Mumper said. “It would cause friction between us.”

He desperately needed to find community, he added, but couldn’t quite get himself to take the first step.

It wasn't until last year at his brother’s 40th birthday party in Orange County that he noticed his brother had something he was missing: a large group of friends.

And there was a trend: most of them, it seemed, met by playing pickleball. Sure, it feels like everyone — and their literal mother — has embraced the sport as of late. But as it turns out, pickleball would be the catalyst for Mumper to get out of his funk.

The pickleball prescription

His brother’s friends were all quite welcoming and encouraged him to start playing, Mumper recalled. “I thought, OK, I want what they have, why not.”

He found a local league in Long Beach, and forced himself to show up to a pickup game one Wednesday afternoon. It pretty quickly turned things around.

Plckelball players Ryan Benson and Maile Sterling bump each other in support while playing at the Santa Monica Pickleball Center.

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“It gets me out of the house, it gets me around other people," he said. “I'm really hitting my stride and pickleball has been a really big part of that.”

At a time when more and more people say they are experiencing feelings of loneliness — particularly in a huge, fast-moving city like Los Angeles — many like Mumper struggle with feelings of isolation and yearn to make meaningful connections with others.

Through the whacking of a ball that sorta resembles a wiffle ball, hundreds of thousands of people have found fulfilling friendships and an overall sense of community through the sport that’s blown up in recent years.

“Basically 90% of my friends are through pickleball,” said Sona Kim Davis, the marketing director at Santa Monica Pickleball Center. “It’s really crazy, like people really do come together for this sport.”

The power of moving in sync

It’s not just pickleball that can pave the way for community building. Group physical movement in general, like sports leagues and dance classes — particularly in adulthood, when there are less natural opportunities to make friends — offer an especially effective route to make strong connections and soothe feelings of loneliness.

“We have pretty good data to suggest that behavioral synchrony can lead to feelings of higher closeness and trust with the people we're in sync with,” said Jamie Krems, an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA who specializes in human friendship. “That’s particularly the case when you’re in sync in larger groups.”

While most group activities boost one’s sense of belonging, studies show that moving in sync can build even stronger social ties and promote a deeper sense of well-being.

To understand why moving in unison with others promotes closeness, Krems said we must look to our evolutionary past. Doing hard work in coordination together, for example, would have been imperative for survival and protection against outside threats, she said. Moving in sync also creates a similarity in how those within the same group perceive and respond to the world, leading to feelings of closeness and rapport.

“That feeling of rhythm and coordination and synchrony might be one of the best ways to engender these feelings of closeness and pro social behavior,” she said.

Part of it has to do with endorphins, which some researchers have called the “neurochemical glue” of human relationships. Scientists have found that moving in sync triggers the endorphin system, which enhances good feelings, more strongly than the effects of the activity itself.

As for Micah Mumper, finding such an activity flipped his entire world upside down, for the better, he said.

“I feel a hundred percent better than I did before I started playing pickleball,” he added. “I feel not as depressed. I feel a whole different view of my abilities to go out and socialize. It's given me this new confidence.”

Patrons play pickleball at the Santa Monica Pickleball Center.

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Dancing and the 'feel good' hormone

On a recent Thursday night at The Victorian in Santa Monica, dozens of patrons with wristbands filed into an oblong-shaped room with a disco ball hanging from the center of the ceiling, salsa music blasted from the speakers.

Nicole Gil, a dance teacher and founder of Dancer University, walked to the middle of the room, a pop-star microphone strapped around her head.

“We’re gonna make two circles, ladies on the inside, gentlemen on the outside,” she said as those in the crowd, a bit timid, took their places.

Instructor Nicole Gil leads in a salsa class at the The Victorian.

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Each week on Thursdays at The Victorian — and most other nights at various clubs around L.A. — Gil teaches salsa and bachata classes to groups of mostly beginners.

While she’s passionate about these forms of dance for their artistry, she said what’s most special about it is the community that’s corralled around it.

“Everyone's laughing about it together, feeling silly together, out of place and out of their comfort zone,” said Gil, who also met her fiancé through dance. “I think that is something that really helps you connect with people.”

And researchers agree. Studies show that dancing in sync — more so than just dancing alongside others — boosts the production of endorphins and leads to social closeness and bonding.

Patrick Padilla, a 27-year-old engineer who recently moved from Saint Louis to Lawndale, attends class as a way to meet people in a new city.

“I like the energy,” he said. “Getting to meet a bunch of new people outside of work. It's really a great way to stay active and then also meet new faces.”

As a bonus, he said he gets to channel his “inner child.”

“As a little kid I liked getting onto the dance floor and just doing my stuff,” he said. “When I grew up, I'm like, what if I could put a little bit of form to all that energy?”

Dancers participate in a salsa class at the The Victorian.

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While the classes are meant for beginners, many come week after week. Each class starts with a lesson, followed by “social dancing,” or freestyle dancing with a partner (which is the standard format for salsa and bachata classes anywhere).

“I've definitely made friends here,” said Joseph Blakey, who lives in Venice and has attended the class several times. “It’s something that requires a partner, so you're always looking for more people to do it with. People want to talk. People want to hang out with you. There's just something about going out dancing with people. And there's something very welcoming about this space.”

Aside from the social engagement, Blakey said learning a new form of dance is sort of like a meditative practice, helping him to stay present.

“You’re engaged in this activity and you’re just enjoying it, the moment,” he said. “It gets me out of my head.”

Gil emphasized that it's not unusual to come solo — many of the attendees did show up alone. In fact, she recommends it.

“You might actually have a better time, so you can focus on your partner and being musical for the duration of the song,” she said.

And for those who feel daunted by the idea of dancing with or in front of others, Gil urges people to just show up — once — even if you have no intention of dancing.

“You might build it up in your head like ‘Oh I’ve got to look for parking, then I’ve got to walk there and it’s cold,” she said. “But once you do it, once you realize that it really wasn’t that bad, I think that helps you get off the couch. And after that you’ll be hooked.”

The magic of a studio

Through a breezeway lined with a melange of palms and desert plants at Hyperion Arts in Silver Lake, a small, eccentric studio tucked in the back of the building is filling up dancers for Intermediate Ballet.

They're in their 20s, in their 60s, in leotards and classic pink tights, or leg warmers and sweatshirts. They are mostly women (one man). Some were once professional ballet dancers, others have only started dancing here.

There’s a whimsical feel about this room, one of the two studios that make up Studio A Dance. It's old — the building was constructed in the 1920s — and quiet, with stained glass windows and string lights lining the ceiling.

In the middle of one of the busiest enclaves of L.A., it’s like you’re entering a place where time stands still.

“Nothing else matters when we’re in there,” said Cat Moore, who is the director of belonging at the University of Southern California and took ballet classes at Studio A for several years. “It’s just you and your body. And by just being there, the other dancers give you this strength and support in just really powerful ways.”

About 10 years ago, in the middle of a “shocking, terrifying” divorce, Moore said she was barely able to eat, sleep or otherwise function in her day to day life, now a single parent to her young son.

She said she was living in survival mode, and felt like her life was slipping through her fingers.

Then, randomly, she stumbled upon a dance studio on a walk home from her local coffee shop and “felt a pull” to sign up for a ballet class: “The last thing I wanted to do was move or exercise, but I sort of knew if I didn’t take a first step, things would get really, really bad,” she added.

The studio, which has gone through several iterations since it was established 41 years ago, offers a variety of classes for adults and kids throughout the week, from ballet to hip hop to contemporary dance.

Throughout this time and no matter the type of class, the mission behind Studio A, as established by its owner Bill Brown, has remained the same: to be a safe haven for Angelenos to not just dance, but to find happiness, as Brown states in a mini film about the studio.

Moore recalled walking into her first class never having danced ballet before and immediately feeling at ease. She said it was the welcoming atmosphere, and how the other dancers were eager to help her with the basics like how to stand at the barre and encouraged her to follow their footwork.

But she said there was also something about the teacher, Cati Jean: “It was like she just had magic coming out of her, is the only way I can describe it. She just had this presence that is so full of life.”

Jean, who is originally from France and has lived in Silver Lake for 25 years, said that's intentional.

“When you bring this aliveness, this openness, it has a ripple effect,” she said, “And that’s what dance does anyway. The artistry, the physicality, the emotion. It brings you alive.”

Moore said that during this traumatic time in her life, Jean’s classes helped her build strength — physically, of course, but more so emotionally.

“I can say for sure that it’s one of the main things that kept me alive during that time,” she said. “Getting back into your body is one of the most fundamental ways to reconnect to yourself.”

Since the publication of the New York Times best seller The Body Keeps the Score in 2014, the idea that our bodies store emotions and trauma has become somewhat mainstream. Dance therapy and other forms of physical or “somatic” techniques have been established as effective tools to help unlock, process and release these difficult emotions that are stored in the body.

Yet the power of dance classes to create a sense of community is perhaps the most healing part.

“I had just such a profound experience of feeling connected to this group of women, and we were hyper focused on doing these moves,” Moore said. “It gave me something to focus on during the worst period of my life.”

COVID made the effect of the community aspect particularly apparent, when Jean continued to teach classes over Zoom so her dancers could at least work on their technique at home. But it was missing “la magie,” she said in French. The magic.

“We need to feel each other’s energy, in the same room, focused on the same thing, together,” Jean said. “It’s like a nutrient. We can’t live without it.”

General Motors agreed to pay $12.75 million in civil penalties for selling driving data of hundreds of thousands of California motorists to data brokers, allegedly without their consent.

The settlement, announced Friday, is the largest ever for violations of the California Consumer Privacy Act, a 2018 law that requires companies to tell consumers about how their data is shared and to respect requests to stop the sharing.

It stemmed from an investigation by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, several county district attorneys, and the California Privacy Protection Agency, which enforces the privacy act. They said General Motors misled drivers who paid for the emergency roadside and navigation service OnStar and made approximately $20 million from the unlawful sale of their data between 2020 and 2024. The information included names, location information, driving behavior, and contact information, Bonta said, which went to the data brokers LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk Analytics.

“This trove of information included precise and personal location data that could identify the everyday habits and movements of Californians,” Bonta said in a press release.

The settlement also requires GM to stop selling data to any consumer reporting agencies for five years and submit privacy assessments to the state, among other provisions. It followed a similar agreement between the Federal Trade Commission and GM earlier this year and California settlements with Honda and Ford over the past 14 months for their own violations of the privacy act.

California’s investigation of GM began after a 2024 New York Times investigation found GM collected data about millions of drivers nationwide and sold it to insurance companies in order to charge the drivers higher premiums. Californians were not impacted by those premium hikes because a state law prohibits insurers from using driving data to set insurance rates, Bonta said.

Bonta told CalMatters at a press conference Friday that it’s unclear if location data collected by General Motors was used by other companies to make predictions about the prices people are willing to pay for goods. That practice is better known as surveillance pricing and can leverage location data. Target paid $5 million to settle a suit from San Diego County’s district attorney over its alleged use of location for the technique. Bonta’s office began an investigation into the surveillance pricing practices of businesses in January.

“I understand that there could be some overlap and maybe we'll discover something in our investigation in surveillance pricing, but that wasn't the focus of this case,” he said.

Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman said the case started with one person finding location data in a report they requested about the data collected on them. That discovery, he added, led to investigations by journalists, prosecutors, and regulators.

“This case shows more than anything that one consumer can make a huge difference,” he said.

Though the settlement isn’t much compared to the $2.7 billion in net income that General Motors made last year, Hochman called it an indication that companies should expect higher penalties in the future. California reached a privacy law violation settlement with Disney in February for $2.75 million, previously the largest of its kind.

In a statement shared with CalMatters, General Motors spokesperson Charlotte McCoy said, “This agreement addresses Smart Driver, a product we discontinued in 2024, and reinforces steps we’ve taken to strengthen our privacy practices. Vehicle connectivity is central to a modern and safe driving experience, which is why we’re committed to being clear and transparent with our customers about our practices and the choices and control they have over their information.”

Californians will soon have a new protection against companies that use their data without their consent. Starting August 1, the more than 500 data brokers registered with the state must comply with requests California residents can make using an online tool known as the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, or DROP. The privacy protection agency introduced the tool earlier this year.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

For nearly a year, people walking down Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown have passed a small patch of what used to be one of the few public park spaces in the neighborhood. It’s now locked behind a tall chain link fence.

Inside, the grass is overgrown and trash is piled up along the edges. The memorial to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — built at the site where he was assassinated in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel — has fallen into disrepair.

The Los Angeles Unified School District fenced off RFK Inspiration Park, located on Wilshire Boulevard. Nearly a year later, the district is considering reopening the space, but only to students at the adjacent RFK Community Schools.

That’s frustrating for some neighbors, who say the park used to belong to everyone.

“I remember the park being open and suddenly a few months after, it was gated,” said Vanessa Aikens, who lives a few blocks away. “I was just wondering why they gated the area because there seemed to be a lot of people interacting with it.”

There has been little information relayed to the community about why.

“We have a number of our members who live right around there and so there’s an angle of access to green space, the access to a safe space for our homeless neighbors,” said Yuval Yossefy, treasurer of Ktown for All, an all-volunteer grassroots organization serving Koreatown’s unhoused community. “This went basically unnoticed.”

Enrique Legaspi, assistant principal at RFK Community Schools, said the school and the district are discussing using the park again, including for classes and student activities. LAUSD confirmed that school leaders have expressed strong interest in using the space for outdoor learning, art programs and student wellness activities.

Officials plan to involve the school community and nearby residents as plans take shape, but they have not given a timeline or said whether the park will reopen to the public.

Koreatown lacks parks

For years, the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks operated and maintained the park under an agreement with the school district dating back to 2010. At the time, the public was allowed to use the space.

Last March, the department stepped away. By then, it had already been taking on costs outside what the 2010 agreement required.

“RAP communicated uncertainty about its ability to sustain long-term maintenance due to staffing and funding constraints,” said Deirdra Boykin, a department spokesperson.

For people who live nearby, the loss of the park has been simple and immediate: there’s nowhere else like it.

“There are no parks around where I live,” Aikens said. “Now I just walk straight down the street.”

In a neighborhood with such limited park space, the memorial park went relatively unnoticed.

“There definitely isn’t enough green space here,” said Emere Alademir, 23, who lives nearby. “I’m originally from Toronto and everywhere they have green space.”

People who never used the park say they would visit if it reopened.

“I’ve never actually gone in but I would be open to coming here if it reopens,” said Wendy Kim, 70, who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years. “Why not? It’s good for everyone.”

Kim, who splits her time between LA and Seoul, said the parks in Seoul are much better maintained than the ones in LA, and that when she craves nature, she travels out of the city for a hike.

“But every place is different and here, the homeless issue is out of hand. That’s just the reality,” she said.

The fence goes up

Public records obtained by Yossefy and reviewed by The LA Local show that city and LAUSD officials coordinated the park’s handoff around a May 22 encampment removal and cleanup, after which LAUSD took control of the site and moved forward with fencing it off. The emails do not explicitly state that the park was fenced because unhoused people were there, but they show encampment removal was a central part of the transition plan.

Volunteers with Ktown For All, who do weekly outreach to the unhoused community in the area, said they were used to seeing people at the park every Saturday.

“It’s just like all of a sudden the fence was there,” said Nicolas Emmons, who has been doing outreach near RFK since around 2021.

Emmons and others said that while some unhoused residents stayed in the park, the majority of the park was open and available.

“At its peak, it was only a small percentage of the park that was being used by people to live in,” he said. “Some of the people that lived there even took it upon themselves to clean the area around their setup.”

Eunice Jeon, another volunteer with the organization, said they had built relationships with people there over several years.

“We regularly saw people there and had built relationships with people there,” she said. “They respected and treated the park well.”

Jeon added that despite restricting access, the closure has not visibly improved the space.

“If anything I would say the park is in worse state ever since the fence has gone up despite nobody being in there,” she said.

Jeon said many individuals she encountered were navigating complex barriers to housing and services, often caught in bureaucratic loops that made it difficult to access help.

“A lot of the time they’re limited by transportation. Some services don’t allow certain things. They need an address, but in order to get something mailed, they need their driver’s license, which they don’t have because they don’t have an address,” she said.

In email chains included in the public records, officials also discussed installing permanent wrought iron fencing at the site. When asked if that remains the plan, LAUSD said the project is still in the “planning phase” and that details, including potential site features, have not been finalized.

“If the park is fenced off, nobody can access it. It doesn’t provide you any use,” Yoseffy said. “There are a number of people that can’t access this park, whether they were sleeping in this park, or they used the park to exercise, if they liked to sit and read — none of those things can happen there anymore because it’s completely closed off.”

Public records show little evidence of public notice. One email mentions posting notices at the park ahead of the cleanup, but there was no formal announcement made to residents that the park — which had been open to the public for years — would be closed and no longer accessible.

“I think that a public space is meant to be used by the public, including the unhoused,” Jeon said. “That’s something they need to address instead of locking up the parks. That’s a failure of the city. Kicking them out won’t keep anyone safer if they have fewer and fewer places to go.”

LA Local reporter Marina Peña contributed to this report.

The online education platform Canvas went offline after a data breach on Thursday, temporarily leaving students and faculty at thousands of U.S. colleges — and K-12 schools — without access to course materials and communications during finals period.

"I'm sure somewhere in the country when the outage happened, there probably were people actually taking final exams on the platform when it crashed," says Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Thirty million users — including at half of the higher education institutions in North America — rely on Canvas to manage courses, submit assignments, view grades and facilitate communication, according to its parent company, Instructure.

But when Linker and many other users tried to do so on Thursday afternoon, they met a black screen and a warning message.

"ShinyHunters has breached Instructure [again]," it read. "Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some 'security patches.'"

ShinyHunters is the same entity that took credit for a massive Ticketmaster data breach in 2024. Like many such groups, it's a cluster of young people working remotely together, "kind of like a ransomware gang," says Rachel Tobac, the CEO of SocialProof Security, which trains people and companies to defend themselves against hackers.

ShinyHunters wrote on a threat intelligence website earlier this week that the initial breach on Saturday involved data — including private messages — from 275 million students, teachers and staff at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide. The group said Thursday that affected schools can prevent the release of their data by consulting with cyber advisory firms and negotiating settlements through the encrypted chat platform Tox.

"You have till the end of the day by 12 May 2026 before everything is leaked," the hackers wrote.

Instructure has confirmed a series of cybersecurity breaches this week and provided status updates on its website. It said the breach only appeared to involve identifying information like names, email addresses, student ID numbers and user messages — no passwords, birth dates, government identifiers or financial information.

Instructure confirmed on an FAQ page that it started an investigation after it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on April 29, and took Canvas offline on Thursday after that same unauthorized actor "made changes that appeared when some students and teachers were logged in." They said the actor exploited an issue with its Free-for-Teacher accounts, which it has temporarily shut down.

"This gives us the confidence to restore access to Canvas, which is now fully back online and available for use," it said in a statement to NPR. "We regret the inconvenience and concern this may have caused."

It's not clear whether Instructure paid a ransom or what the return of Canvas access could mean for the hackers' May 12 deadline.

Tobac says Canvas could be back online because of a successful negotiation, or because the hackers "didn't get super far in their attack." Either way, she says users should stay vigilant, especially for phishing messages — whether it's someone posing as Canvas prompting a password change, or pretending to be a professor sending course materials.

"I would operate under the assumption that there's going to be some knock-on effects here," she says.

Not everyone got back online immediately 

Just before midnight on Thursday, Instructure posted online that "Canvas is now available for most users," though two separate services, Canvas Beta and Canvas Test, remained in maintenance mode.

Students and faculty at at least some schools were still unable to access Canvas on Friday — either because service had not yet been restored or because administrators warned them to stay away.

Penn State University, for example, said Friday morning that while the school's Canvas access had been partially restored, it was "not yet ready for use."

"Technical teams at Penn State are actively working to prepare the system for our community," it added. "As access is restored, Canvas integrations and related services will be brought back online in phases."

Several schools have taken similar approaches, either temporarily disabling Canvas access or outright asking users to steer clear. The University of California said across its schools, "Canvas access will not be restored until we are confident the system is secure."

And it's not just higher education: The Montgomery County Public School system in Maryland alerted families on Friday morning that even as service returned, it is "continuing to test and review systems before restoring access."

Tobac says this could mean that schools think the attackers might still be within their systems, potentially stealing information like passwords and messages.

"The attackers probably got some sensitive information and … [schools] don't want this information out online," she says.

Many schools are urging users to be on high alert for any unsolicited emails or messages that appear to come from Canvas, especially those requesting login credentials, as Georgetown University warned. The University of Amsterdam — which says it's one of 44 Dutch educational institutions affected — also recommends people change their passwords on any other sites where they use the same one.

Tobac also recommends using a password manager — to generate long, random passwords for each login — and turning on multi-factor authentication for all online accounts, not just Canvas. She says any student or professor who gets a suspicious call, text or email should "use another method of communication to verify what is authentic."

"Even if there was no breach yesterday, I would say these are the things that I recommend you do," she adds, urging people to "be politely paranoid."

The breach disrupts finals, highlights vulnerabilities

Several schools affected by the breach have already postponed or outright scrapped some final exams, with others warning students and professors that they might need to do so.

The University of Illinois is postponing all final exams and assignments scheduled through Sunday. Penn State canceled certain exams scheduled for Thursday night and Friday, saying it was working with faculty to "determine next steps for final grading" and urging students to check their emails (not Canvas) regularly in the meantime. And Baylor University delayed Friday exams and asked all faculty to send students "whatever study materials they have on their local computers to students as soon as possible."

The breach has underscored how much of academia relies on a single, centralized platform.

Linker, of UPenn, told NPR that he received an influx of panicked messages from students on Thursday afternoon when they suddenly couldn't access PowerPoints, readings and previous exams as they tried to study for Monday's final.

"The problem with using a platform like Canvas is that most [students] are not going to have the readings available printed out or on their laptops," he explains. "It all lives on the online platform, and if that platform goes down, they have no way to access them."

He told students on Thursday that he would upload the course materials to another platform (like Dropbox or Google Docs) if Canvas access wasn't restored by Friday morning. Fortunately, he says, it came back online shortly before 9 a.m. ET.

But Linker says he has concerns about relying fully on Canvas in the future.

"Given what this has exposed, the vulnerability involved and also the concern with the data breaches, I'm starting to rethink whether this is really a wise way to proceed," he says.

One example of that is grading. Linker says Canvas makes it so easy to calculate and weigh students' scores — on individual assessments and overall — that it's come to function as a digital grade book. Going forward, he says he may start keeping an analog record of students' grades just in case.

While Canvas does have competitors like Blackboard, Linker says he doesn't think any would be less vulnerable to a future breach. And Tobac agrees.

"The problem is not that this one website had this cyber event, right? Because nothing in this world is unhackable," she says. "The thing that we have to think about is disaster recovery: How do we continue doing business when there is a cyber event, and how do we do our very best to keep the bad actors out?"

Tobac says this week has shown that many institutions did not have a clear plan for how students and professors can be in touch and access course materials without Canvas. She said those plans should vary based on schools' different circumstances and schedules — which might explain why some are proceeding with finals as usual while others are scrapping exams altogether. But she'd like them to approach the immediate aftermath with one common goal.

"We have to treat people with dignity and respect," Tobac says. "And I hope that that is something that the institutions do, within their timelines and constraints."
Copyright 2026 NPR

An international team of disease detectives is now racing to connect with the more than two dozen passengers who disembarked the MV Honius cruise ship on the Atlantic island of St. Helena before the hantavirus outbreak was identified.

These individuals have flown across the world, including to the United States.

The risk of further spread of this virus is low since it requires close and prolonged contact with an infected individual — and those infected seem to transmit the virus for only a brief period of time. But public health officials want to make sure the outbreak is contained.

Here's how authorities are using the practice of contact tracing to contain the outbreak and keep the hantavirus from spreading.

Contact tracing 101

The concept of modern contact tracing dates to the 1930s and was part of an effort to stop the spread of syphilis. It involves locating the close contacts of anyone who may have been infected. "By identifying people who are at risk of infection," says Preeti Malani, an infectious disease physician at the University of Michigan, "you try to get ahead when people don't have symptoms yet with the goal of preventing the infection from continuing to propagate."

This is a well-tested approach for containing an infectious disease. "It's the oldest tool in the epidemiologic toolbox," explains Malani. "We thought about this a lot early in the pandemic with COVID. But we also do contact tracing for sexually transmitted infections, for things like meningitis and even measles."

Malani likens contact tracing to monitoring ripples in a pond, "trying to prevent those outer rings from propagating by isolating individuals and by identifying individuals who might be at risk of infection."

The idea that "there's a time period where people don't have symptoms but could be harboring the virus, that's what contact tracing helps identify," says Malani.

It starts by pinpointing someone with an infection or suspected infection of the disease in question — in this case, hantavirus. Epidemiologists then look to see with whom they've recently had close contact since these individuals are more likely to have been infected.

This hunt for those with the greatest probability of infection is important. "Otherwise, it becomes an impossible web to contain because everyone is connected to everyone," says Boghuma Titanji, an infectious diseases doctor at Emory University. "So you have to stratify by high, intermediate and low-risk contacts."

The next step involves public health agencies ordering precautions for those who are infected or who may be infected but aren't showing symptoms yet. Such measures may include quarantine, so that an individual doesn't come into contact with even more people — who may then become infected.

One challenge that hantavirus presents is that its incubation period can last up to several weeks. In other words, "people take a long time to become symptomatic after they've been exposed," says Titanji. "Some of these primary contacts would have to be monitoring themselves for symptoms for up to 45 days to be at the tail end of that very long incubation period."

Aboard and ashore

The work isn't high-tech but it is painstaking, requiring officials to reconstruct the many interactions someone may have had over days or weeks.

Onboard the cruise ship, "you might have an individual who is a source of an infection," says Titanji, laying out a hypothetical example. "And then they were sitting at a dinner table with one individual who then goes back to their cabin and shares a bed with their partner who has a conversation with someone else on the deck."

Once someone disembarks the ship, the number of potential interactions can grow quite quickly. This is why officials were concerned when a KLM flight attendant fell ill after being aboard a flight with one of the infected cruise ship passengers. Fortunately, the flight attendant ultimately tested negative for hantavirus.

Titanji is heartened by what she's seen playing out so far. "It seems like the international collaborative effort has been really robust and the mechanisms for containment are in place and underway," she says.

Public health officials argue that contact tracing is a powerful approach that will reduce further spread. "We can break this chain of transmission," said Abdi Mahmoud, the director of the World Health Organization's health emergency alert and response efforts, at a press conference on Thursday.

He has good reason to be confident. Contact tracing was vital during the fight against COVID-19 and helped end the Ebola crisis in Liberia, containing the epidemic there more than a decade ago. Some of the contact tracing even involved hours-long hikes through the jungle to a remote village.

Authorities are hoping for similar success with this hantavirus outbreak.
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