Hantavirus has flared up in the American SW for well over 100 years. Even in Navajo Indian storytelling back to the early 1900s. It usually coincides with wet years when the is plenty of seeds/nuts/etc for the rodent population. It is a vermin caused disease..get rid of the vermin, you get rid of the disease.
Yes, it isn’t anything new in this neck of the woods, i.e., out here in the desert Southwest. Didn’t Gene Hackman’s wife succumb to it after cleaning out a dusty old shed? What may be new is human-to-human transmission.