The Italian Ministry of Health said on Tuesday that tests were being conducted on biological samples taken from two people to check whether they were infected with the Hanta virus: an Argentine tourist who was hospitalized with pneumonia and a man from Calabria who is voluntarily isolated. The ministry said in a statement that the Argentine tourist left an affected area in her country on April 30 and traveled to Italy on a flight from Buenos Aires to Rome before heading to Sicily, where she was admitted to hospital due to pneumonia. Local health authorities requested tests on Tuesday, and the tourist's sample was sent to an infectious diseases hospital in Rome, where it will be analyzed along with a sample from the 25-year-old Italian citizen, who was briefly in contact with a Dutch woman who later died from the virus. In a separate development, a British tourist was located in Milan and placed in quarantine after British authorities warned that he was on the same flight as the Dutch woman, the Ministry of Health said. A companion of his who was traveling with him was also taken to the hospital as a precaution. According to the World Health Organization, Hantavirus is spread primarily by rodents but can be transmitted between humans in rare cases. Its symptoms usually begin with flu-like symptoms, such as fatigue and fever, one to eight weeks after infection with the virus. A group of cases of infection in recent days have been linked to the ship Hondius, which docked in the Spanish Canary Islands following a polar expedition that launched from Argentina. The World Health Organization raised the number of confirmed cases linked to the ship to nine. She said that more cases may appear due to the long incubation period, but stressed that this is not a pandemic, and is nothing like the Covid-19 pandemic.