The truthful messaging should be, “there is no chance this will become a pandemic. You have no risk of contracting hantavirus, unless you decide to sweep mice droppings in New Mexico,” Vinjay Prasad says.
Ten years ago, this would have been natural. No one would be burdening the public with a discussion of whether hantavirus was once spread by saying “Hello.” The media would be broadly disinterested in the topic and would not cover it beyond the broader context of cruise ships spreading infectious disease, and being a supposedly fun thing I will never do again.
Of course, the covid pandemic has altered that. SARS-CoV-2, a new virus, had all the properties that guaranteed a global pandemic (Andes hantavirus doesn’t). With covid, the concern among many Sensible Medicine columnists was that our response choices – prolonged school closure, cloth masking kids, Paxlovid for healthy, vaccinated people, booster mandates for college students, or those who just recovered from covid – were pointless theatre, and worse: very likely, on balance, harmful. Two things were true: covid killed many Americans, and we did a lot of harmful, pointless, self-defeating (and kid-defeating) things in response....<<<Read More>>>...
