About the Author

Andy Wilcox is an independent researcher writing about viruses, pandemics, and public-health response. He is not a physician, and nothing here is medical advice — his work is the product of disciplined primary-source research, applying the same analytical approach he has used across 30+ years as a consultant, operating executive, and investor.

He holds an MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and is a licensed CPA and certified Project Management Professional (PMP) — a background built on evaluating evidence carefully and reasoning with data. His consulting career began at Ernst & Young, where he led business-process and systems-implementation projects for Fortune 500 clients including the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and the hospital network Partners HealthCare, giving him early exposure to how large healthcare and life-sciences organizations operate.

Since 2015 he has served on the Executive, Screening, and Due Diligence committees of Triangle Angel Partners, an angel fund that invests in life-sciences and high-tech companies alongside members who include physicians, PhDs, and career investors — its portfolio includes medical-technology ventures such as Deep Blue Medical and OrbitalRX. Evaluating early-stage companies means reading the underlying science critically, pressure-testing claims, and separating evidence from hype — the same habits he brings to this research. He is comfortable with data and probability, having built Monte Carlo forecasting models and led complex quantitative analysis, which shapes how he reads epidemiological data and study results rather than headlines.

His focus on viruses began during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it began personally. His aging parents were confined to their assisted-living facility, and watching the toll of that isolation led him to research its emotional impact on at-risk populations — which widened into a broader study of what triggers a pandemic, which public-health responses hold up under scrutiny, and how outbreaks ripple through economies and communities. Since 2020 he has read and summarized hundreds of articles and peer-reviewed studies and tracked every major variant wave, citing primary sources rather than aggregating other websites.

HantavirusQuestions.com applies that same research practice to hantavirus — a rodent-borne pathogen that is rare but carries a high fatality rate and remains widely misunderstood. It's part of Virus Questions (virusquestions.com), a network he founded that also includes CoronavirusQuestions.com, EbolaQuestions.com, and NorovirusQuestions.com. You can find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyswilcox/.

Editorial & Medical Review Policy

This site is written and researched by Andy Wilcox, an independent researcher, not a physician. Nothing on this site is medical advice.

• Content is based on primary-source research — peer-reviewed studies and official guidance from bodies such as the CDC and WHO — rather than summaries of other websites.
• We cite specific studies and primary sources so readers can verify claims themselves.
• Content is reviewed and updated when new evidence changes the picture.
• For personal medical decisions, readers should consult a qualified healthcare professional.

Four Method Habits, and Where to Check Them

Credibility here rests on method rather than credentials, so the method should be checkable. Four habits show up on every hantavirus page on this site:

1. Read the data file, not the summary page. CDC's consumer page on reported cases stops at 2023. The weekly NNDSS tables and the patient-level file behind CDC's own map do not. The state-level case-fatality figures and the provisional 2024–2026 counts on the outbreaks page come from reading those directly, and each is labelled as our tabulation rather than as something CDC states.
2. Name the study behind the number, and give its interval or its denominator. The symptoms page does not say "about 38%" and stop; it separates CDC's three fatality figures by denominator and publishes the case-fatality rate by age band with the p value attached.
3. Publish the disagreement rather than averaging it. PAHO's alert records 7 U.S. cases for 2025 where CDC's own tables show 35 for the same period. Both are on the outbreaks page, with an explanation of why they differ and which one is the surveillance system of record.
4. Delete what cannot be sourced, and say so. Four unsourced figures were removed from this site in September 2026 — environmental survival times, approximate country case ranges, an El Niño citation pointing at the wrong journal, and a respirator recommendation attributed to OSHA. Each removal is stated on the page where it happened and logged on the corrections page.

On economic expertise. The business and financial background described above is genuine and it is relevant to exactly one page on this site — the economic burden page, where it informs judgements about cost-of-illness methodology and about when a derived figure would be spurious. It confers no clinical authority and is not offered as any. On every clinical page the qualification that matters is the source cited, not the person citing it.

To get in touch or report an inaccuracy, use the contact page.