The mainstream outlets covering hantavirus like a tragedy rather than a disaster are getting the story right. But there will always be a market for doomerism.
There isn’t a cable news producer on earth who could resist the temptations presented by the outbreak of a rare and deadly communicable disease — and on a cruise ship, no less. Stories like those present ambitious commentators with conflicting incentives. The foremost imperative is, of course, to inform the public of their relative risk, but the human-interest element is also irresistible. Filling news consumers’ heads with lurid images of a diseased ghost ship bound for ports unknown is the sort of thing that captures eyeballs in an age of short attention spans.
For the most part, the mainstream left-of-center press has elevated its duty to inform over its imperatives around audience retention. The New York Times’ coverage of the outbreak of hantavirus on the cruise ship MV Hondius in the South Atlantic, in which three people have died, has, for example, emphasized the limited risk to the general public from this disease.
“It’s good to be cautious, but there’s no need for concern over a global outbreak,” one immunologist told the Times. The Andean variant of this flu-like disease, which humans typically contract through exposure to the feces and urine of infected rodents, is difficult to treat. And it is deadly. Another strain of this disease — the Sin Nombre strain — has a lethality rate of around 35 percent. But person-to-person transmission is rare. The virus “burrows deep into the lungs and infects blood vessels,” the report added, limiting cases of human transmission to people living in very close quarters, “like health care workers or those who share a household.”
National Public Radio has been just as cautious. “It’s very, very surprising, and obviously a very rare occurrence,” one virologist said of the evidence that the virus on that boat is jumping from one human to another. “If I were on the ship and I had a mask, I would probably be masking.” Still, even that hypercautious virologist conceded that the number of cases on that ship is too few to suggest that this disease is especially transmissible. Even the Huffington Post is observing commendable discretion. The outbreak is “not concerning for the general public,” Brown University’s Pandemic Center director confessed. What’s more, because it is not easily transmissible, there’s almost no chance this thing becomes the “new COVID.”
This is all quite reassuring. At least, it could reassure those who set out to inform themselves of their relative risk. But there is a species of news consumer who has little interest in relative risk. They seek out stronger stuff in their media diet. For those who want the press to stimulate their already hyperactive amygdala, there is no shortage of irresponsible communicators who are willing to trigger their readers’ fight-or-flight response by evaluating the outbreak through the prism of their contempt for the Trump administration.
If the hantavirus reaches America, “we’re doomed,” declared Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce. Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from the World Health Organization, turned against experts and the best practices they recommend, and its public health apparatus is led by an absolute crank. Even if we concede all this, that still doesn’t justify Pierce’s conclusion: “An outbreak of any disease more serious than Covid-19 and this country is in a world of hurt,” he wrote. “We are in the hands of the madmen now.” Fortunately, this virus is not “more serious” than Covid.
Other venues that have made reflexive hostility toward this White House part of their respective brands also leaned into fomenting panic around the outbreak. “Health Officials Confirm Worst-Case Scenario in Rat Virus Cruise,” the Daily Beast’s headline read. You’d have to read beyond the paywall to learn that the WHO has assured the public that this “is not the next Covid.”
Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign vehicle, “Headquarters,” which masquerades as a media outlet, bent over backward to couple its readers’ fear of Trump with their fear of the outside world:
RFK Jr. has fired every single CDC Vessel Sanitation Program inspector, who investigate cruise ship outbreaks.
This comes as the deadly Hantavirus rapidly spreads on a cruise ship at sea. pic.twitter.com/GI1g0cUwLb
— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) May 6, 2026
There is something perverse in the exploitation of the progressive left’s anxiety — a pronounced feature of the modern left-wing activist’s psychological profile. More perverse still is the unstated wish fathering the thought that this virus could bloom into the next global pandemic. Maybe if it did, and if many more people died, the “abundance of caution” that typified the public health apparatus’s draconian response to Covid-19 would be retroactively vindicated?
That would be a terribly high cost to bear just so some left-of-center political obsessives could secure an exculpatory narrative for themselves. Fortunately for the rest of us, this hantavirus outbreak is unlikely to relieve this unhappy cohort of their bitterness. The mainstream news outlets that are covering this outbreak like a tragedy rather than a disaster are getting the story right. But there will always be a market for doomerism.