Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome saw 173x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS), also called hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), is a severe respiratory disease caused by hantavirus infection. The main features of illness are microvascular leakage and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Symptoms occur anywhere from one to eight weeks after exposure to the virus and come in three distinct phases. First, there is an early phase with flu-like symptoms such as fever, muscle aches, headache, and shortness of breath, as well as low platelet count. Second, there is a cardiopulmonary phase during which people experience elevated or irregular heart rate, cardiogenic shock, and pulmonary capillary leakage, which can lead to respiratory failure, low blood pressure, and buildup of fluid in the lungs and chest cavity. The final phase is recovery, which typically takes months, but difficulties with breathing can persist for up to two years. The disease has a case fatality rate of 30 to 60 percent. Death usually occurs suddenly during the cardiopulmonary phase.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 10 edits to this article on 2026-05-07, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Notable cases
• Environment

What changed that day

The article grew by 299 characters that day. The largest single addition was 141 characters to External links. See everything that changed on 2026-05-07 in Wikipedia's own diff view — that is where the reason for a surge is usually visible, written and sourced by the editors who were following the story.

How this was measured

Views are Wikimedia's own pageview counts for en.wikipedia, filtered to agent=user so automated traffic is excluded. The baseline is the median of the previous 60 days, which is used instead of the mean so that an earlier surge cannot flatten a later one. The multiple is the day's views divided by that median.