{"id":795900,"date":"2026-05-14T13:36:19","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T13:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/795900\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T13:36:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T13:36:19","slug":"worlds-reaction-to-hantavirus-tinged-by-echoes-of-covid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/795900\/","title":{"rendered":"World’s reaction to hantavirus tinged by echoes of COVID"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 The lingering impact of COVID-19<\/a>, a few years out from the declaration that the pandemic was over, is scattered across how we live today \u2014 the work-from-home jobs<\/a>, the way some have decided wearing masks is their new normal, the hand sanitizer dispensers that remain ever present.<\/p>\n

Some of the other ripples, though, aren\u2019t as obvious. They\u2019re the ones we carry inside us \u2014 grief over lost loved ones, chronic health conditions, the sense of lives interrupted. And in recent days, another one has made itself known in the wake of a rare hantavirus outbreak<\/a> aboard a cruise ship: the fear, despite official reassurances, that it might be happening again.<\/p>\n

But the flourishing of fear, whether on a personal or societal level, can also be an indicator that something else is missing. Perhaps there\u2019s no post-pandemic reality more entrenched than the damage done, in the U.S. and globally, to the bonds that in the before times, many would have considered secure \u2014 science, government, information itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cCOVID undermined our trust in what most of us used to trust,\u201d said Elisa Jayne Bienenstock, a research professor and sociologist at Arizona State University. \u201cWhen general trust goes down, when there\u2019s a lot of cynicism, who are people looking to, to explain what to do and how the world works?\u201d <\/p>\n

What it used to be and what it is now<\/p>\n

Before 2020, the outbreak of some illness somewhere didn\u2019t usually cause massive concern outside of the specific areas impacted, even as some epidemics caused significant numbers of deaths.<\/p>\n

Some of that was complacency in the face of a world where widespread travel wasn\u2019t as accessible to the masses as it has become, which was a key part of COVID-19\u2019s spread.<\/p>\n

In fact, there have been outbreaks of the current strain of hantavirus in some South American countries through the decades, like one in 1997 in Chile. Other countries have had epidemics of a range of illnesses from cholera to dengue to SARS, and the U.S. has seen West Nile<\/a>, Legionnaire\u2019s<\/a> and more.<\/p>\n

But in a post-COVID-19 world, it didn\u2019t take long before questions and concerns surfaced about disease spread in the days immediately following the first reports that three people had died from hantavirus on the ship. A total of nine confirmed and two suspected cases<\/a> have been identified, including the fatalities.<\/p>\n

Health experts have repeatedly emphasized that even though the virus can cause serious illness in those infected, the risk of spread in the general public is low. Despite that, when ship passengers were taken to the Spanish island of Tenerife to disembark, residents like Samantha Aguero were concerned.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe feel a bit unsafe. We don\u2019t feel as there are 100% security measures in place to welcome it,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is a virus, after all, and we have lived this during the pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Institutions are diminished for many<\/p>\n

Bienenstock points to three institutions that have suffered from the public\u2019s loss of trust: government, media and science itself. But government officials and journalists were dealing with issues of public mistrust well before the pandemic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The mistrust of science got ammunition not because scientists were making mistakes in their processes but because non-scientists didn\u2019t have the same understanding, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost people don\u2019t think of science as a process. In their mind, science is an answer, it\u2019s a fact. And so when those facts showed that they weren\u2019t 100% reliable and assured, it started undermining trust in the science,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the problems with COVID is it undermined that confidence in science for people who don\u2019t understand how science works. It showed the process. And it showed that scientists don\u2019t always have the answer,\u201d Bienenstock said. \u201cA lot of people in crisis, when they fear things, don\u2019t care what the answer is, as long as there\u2019s a definitive answer. And science doesn\u2019t provide that when it doesn\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now what?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just about the issue at the forefront of people\u2019s attention at the moment. There are ripple effects as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cCOVID … didn\u2019t just heighten people\u2019s sensitivity to health threats. It did so unevenly, in ways often disconnected from actual risk,\u201d said Michele Gelfand, professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. \u201cAs trust in institutions has weakened, people have lost a key way to navigate uncertainty together. Without trust, people rely more on rumor, fear, and emotion, which can lead them to overreact to small risks and underreact to serious ones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Karlynn Morgan, a 76-year-old retired nurse-anesthetist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has seen that heightened attention, with more people without a medical or science background talking about health issues than before the pandemic.<\/p>\n

She has also been disturbed by the increase in what looks to her like a lack of trust in science, as seen in falling vaccination rates<\/a> and rising instances of diseases like measles.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think people are far less trusting because people used to take their children and just get the vaccine,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen I was a kid, there was no question you were going to go get your shot.\u201d<\/p>\n

If trust is going to be rebuilt, Gelfand said in an email, then leaders have to get involved.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey set the threat signal. They determine whether people get accurate information about the level of danger or distorted information that serves a political agenda. When leaders send clear, honest signals, people can calibrate in the face of threat. When leaders manipulate threat for their own purposes, norms erode and and trust collapses,\u201d Gelfand said.<\/p>\n

\u201cStrong, reliable institutions have historically been our superpower as a society. They\u2019re what allow millions of people to coordinate under uncertainty without knowing each other personally,\u201d she said. \u201cWithout that institutional backbone, we lose the very capacity for collective action that has helped human groups survive for millennia.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Follow the AP\u2019s coverage of the hantavirus outbreak at https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/hantavirus<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 The lingering impact of COVID-19, a few years out from the declaration that the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":795901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[7824,4140,324754,57,316365,210,1165,16728,321149,61,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-795900","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-coronavirus","9":"tag-covid-19","10":"tag-elisa-jayne-bienenstock","11":"tag-general-news","12":"tag-hantavirus","13":"tag-health","14":"tag-lifestyle","15":"tag-pandemics","16":"tag-samantha-aguero","17":"tag-u-s-news","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/795901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}