Public health officials have been clear in explaining that the hantavirus outbreak is not another COVID-19.
But despite reassurances from experts in Canada and abroad that the virus is not easily transmissible between humans, news of the passengers exposed on the MV Hondius cruise ship has triggered memories of the COVID-19 pandemic and fears of mass infections and lockdowns.
Before the last of the passengers had left the boat, some social media users were advocating for them to be left on board, saying they don’t want another pandemic. Some have presented the outbreak as a “trolley scenario,” where the choice is between sacrificing the passengers or infecting all of humanity.
One TikTok user claimed hantavirus could “wipe out the entire human race.” Another, with a million likes, makes the false claim, “This is going faster than COVID.”
Steve Joordens, a psychology professor at University of Toronto Scarborough, says his brain also went to pandemic fears at first.
“I think there’s part of all of us that’s thinking, ‘Could it come again?'” he said. “So if that’s already floating around our mind, then we don’t need much of a stimulus to kind of go, ‘Oh.’ And I think, for a lot of us, that’s what this was.”
As Canadian passengers from the hantavirus-hit MV Hondius cruise ship are back home isolating, there are concerns about a potential spread of the illness. For The National, Erica Johnson puts viewers’ questions to infectious diseases specialist Dr. Lynora Saxinger.
Health officer had ‘sinking feeling’
For some, it’s conjured memories of the 2020 Diamond Princess cruise ship, when more than 700 of the 3,711 people on board caught COVID-19 at the outset of the global pandemic.
Dr. Bonnie Henry, B.C.’s provincial health officer, said at a Monday news conference she also felt a “sinking feeling” when she heard the initial news of people developing a serious illness on a cruise ship.
“I probably have as much traumatic stress from that as anybody else in this province, in this country,” she said, reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic, during which she led the province’s response.
Henry said she was “a little incredulous” when she first heard the outbreak on the cruise ship was hantavirus, because she was not aware of the Andes strain that can pass from person to person. The common strain in North America is Sin Nombre, which is thought to only be contracted from inhalation of rodent urine or feces.
But Henry says colleagues around the globe who work in public health and infectious disease have calmed each other down after initial worries.
“It’s not what we would consider a disease of pandemic potential,” she said. While it is still “very serious,” she said it does not spread the way we’ve seen with COVID-19, influenza and measles.
Brains ‘hypersensitive’ to fear: psychologist
Joordens says our brains are naturally wired to look for threats, prepare for them and then take action. And in the social media world, taking action means posting.
“And so these things that are kind of fear based can spread very strongly, because the brain is hypersensitive to that kind of message,” he said.
Assurances from public officials are likely helping some people calm their fears and anxieties after their initial emotional response, according to Joordens.
However, he says people have to be open to receiving new information, which is increasingly complicated in a climate where public institutions, government and the media appear to be losing public trust.
“If you no longer trust the experts, and you no longer trust the news sources … then, how do we know?” Joordens said.
He says the current division in society, “which is sort of a leftover from the pandemic,” is making it harder for people to think rationally. On top of that, fear sells on social media, which some users capitalize on by knowingly spreading things that are false or sensationalized.
“All these factors together are making it really hard to rationally navigate things like this. And that’s exactly what we need to keep us calm, and to have that assurance of control that we need to kind of quell the emotional system,” he said.
‘A very different scenario’
Breaking down the differences between COVID-19 and hantavirus, Henry explained that a coronavirus causes infection in the upper respiratory system first, so people “can shed quite a lot of the virus” when they talk, sneeze or cough. It can spread rapidly through the air, especially in closed environments with poor ventilation.
On the MV Hondius, Henry says the virus seems to have spread to people who had close contact with other infected people over a period of time.
“It’s a very different scenario,” she said.
Henry and other health officials have emphasized that hantavirus is not highly transmissible, and they do not expect to see further transmission now that the exposed individuals are in isolation and being monitored.
In response to a reporter’s question on Monday, B.C. Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry stressed that the hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship is a ‘very different scenario’ from how the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. ‘We don’t see the same pattern of spread that we would see if it was transmissible in the same way as coronavirus or measles or influenza,’ she said.
Henry said genome sequencing is showing that the hantavirus, unlike COVID-19, does not appear to be rapidly mutating or becoming more infectious — which she says is “also reassuring.”
P.E.I.’s chief public health officer Heather Morrison, speaking with CBC News: Compass, also said the hantavirus outbreak “is not going to be the start of another pandemic.”
“When we hear about this virus, I think it’s so understandable why we would be worried and why our family members and even young family are asking, what does this mean and what does this look like?” Morrison said.
