It’s extremely unlikely that the next pandemic is at hand.
It’s extremely unlikely that the next pandemic is at hand.
A ludicrous headline from Yahoo! News this week: “Trump says he thinks the U.S. is in ‘very good shape’ amid hantavirus outbreak.” Ludicrous that he was even asked in the first place, I mean. You’d think forklifts and front-loaders were gathering up the dead for bonfires on the edge of town. We’re talking about a small outbreak on a cruise ship on the other side of the Atlantic. Nineteen people are in quarantine in the U.S. The attention paid to this story makes it seem as if enemy crop dusters are spraying liquified Ebola in every major city in the world.
Are you worried? No, you are not worried. But you get the feeling that you’re supposed to be worried about the hantavirus. Of course, some are. There are people who swaddled themselves in plastic wrap and didn’t leave the house for six weeks when monkeypox was the next big thing, but they’re the people who still congregate in the zero-Covid subreddits and worry about looking at themselves in the mirror without a mask, lest they auto-infect.
Of course, a vocal contingent on social media is convinced that we’re being played again: Here come the lockdowns! It’s not crazy to be suspicious, but on the other hand, it is. The authorities overplayed their hand with Covid. You suspect they know it. They wouldn’t try a lockdown again unless something has a 62 percent fatality rate that kills within 30 seconds of infection. Even then, loud skeptics who’d just seen a hundred people keel over at the mall gasping for breath as their skin sloughs off would say “This is just to push a vaccine! I didn’t let Bill Gates rewrite my genetic code then, and I’m not going to let him do it now.”
Why, then, the hantapanic? Clicks, of course. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had a story: “What Pittsburghers need to know about hantavirus.” Great local angle. But the story should consist entirely of “Pittsburghers won’t get it unless you snort mouse poop like a line of Bolivian coke at Studio 54.”
But there’s also the political point-scoring. Did cuts to the CDC mean that our mouse-poop detection teams were fired? Didn’t Elon Musk and Trump and DOGE cut funding to an NGO that funded a program that used “interpretative dance” to “raise awareness about hantavirus in marginalized non-binary luggage handlers in cruise-ship ports”?
Hantapanic also reveals an actual problem you may not see. It underscores the need to harden our institutions to deal with Disease X, a deadly virus whose devastating lethality could reshape the world as we know it. Firstpost.com: “‘I don’t think that anyone, either in India or abroad, is truly ready for Disease X. Given the current geopolitical environment, international cooperation is compromised and intergovernmental bodies like the WHO have been weakened. This is concerning and the roots of the problem are beyond anyone’s control,’ said Prof. Anurag Agrawal.”
This sounds bad! The article also notes: “Disease X is a term for an unknown pathogen that could cause a future pandemic.” In other words, don’t be too concerned about hantavirus on a boat on the other side of the planet, but do lend a moment to thinking about a disease that does not yet exist but will possibly put you in the ground in a day unless you stay home for six months and have your groceries delivered by drones.
In a way, everyone’s right. The skeptics are right: Lockdowns were ruinous and empowered the petty people who loved having new rules to follow and enforce. The public-health community is right: Bad bugs are inevitable, and should we suddenly face Parakeet Flu CD-29 that slays every third left-handed person, we will need strong, forthright, honest instructions from Science People.
It’s possible we’ll get it right next time. Let’s hope we never come to that point, and the rest of our days are untroubled by pandemics. Just colds, flu, norovirus, brucellosis, shingles, psoriasis, seborrhea, catarrh, the grippe, sailor’s itch, and all the other miseries visited upon us by the wee beasties teeming on this dangerous green rock.