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Why do people care so much about the hantavirus outbreak? The ship is still all over the news and social media. The WHO director-general went to the ship personally, which further indicates that this is a really important matter. It is constantly being compared to covid. Officials keep telling people to calm down, but the way this is covered, the warnings have the opposite effect. The public response seems frantic and only serves to create more uncertainty.
And yet, it just doesn't seem that serious. Sure it can be deadly if you are infected. But from what I understand, Hantavirus mostly spreads to humans through ingestion or inhalation of fluids from rodents. There seems to be no evidence that human to human infection is something the virus is really capable of, and even if this is a strain that mutated to do that, it also doesn't spread through the air.
The most likely scenario in my mind is that hygiene issues on the ship led to a rodent infestation which infected the passengers, and that there is basically no chance that this spreads to the rest of society. It seems about as serious as a hotel giving its residents food poisoning. Terrible for those involved, but irrelevant to the broader world.
But the constant coverage makes me wonder if I am missing something important. Or is this really just a case of the media selling news by appealing to pandemic trauma?
I'd chalk it down to post-COVID hypersensitivity. It's not like those years have faded from popular memory or discourse, and another scary-sounding viral outbreak can be reasonably expected to get many people going.
I'm not worrying about it. Less because I've done the kind of review that @Throwaway05 might have done (I know very little about HV beyond the high mortality rate and proven H2H and zoonotic transmission), and more because I'm tired boss.
Living through one global pandemic and then the overzealous measures around it was enough for me. Even if there's a new outbreak, until it gets much, much worse than Covid ever did, I'll still have to come into work. Perks of being an essential worker.
If we've got neo-Ebola-plus-plus, then I might seriously consider taking a career break and sitting indoors. Like, >2% CFRs for my reference class is my standard for "oh dear", and if it crosses 10%, I'm handing in my badge
and going to the Winchester to wait for it blow over.Otherwise, I'll start caring when we're talking >10k people infected, in multiple countries, in the span of a month or two. Caring isn't the same as doing anything in particular, that's just my personal threshold for sitting up and taking proper notice.
From my understanding (which is not based off of exhaustive review) the outbreak is effectively over (come laugh at me later if it is not).
People are sensitive because of the great trauma which....sure.
I can't imagine how much of a freakout the 2014 Ebola outbreak would have caused these days.
The Coming Plague, well before 2014 (early 90s?) certainly made it sound feasible. That was an interesting book. The girl I was seeing at the time (then yet-to-be-a-med-student, now a fairly reputable doctor) used to go on and on about it. I think pandemics or their possibility are what got her into medicine,
though apparently she's not now an epidemiologist.Edit: NevermindMore options
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