Hantavirus: News hype does not reflect reality

The “news-to-death ratio” is a concept introduced by Hans Rosling during the early days of the 2009 swine flu “pandemic.”

The ratio highlights the disproportionate media coverage of certain diseases, such as swine flu, while others barely get a mention, such as tuberculosis (“TB”).

For example, in the first 13 days of the 2009 swine flu “pandemic,” Rosling calculated that there were 8,176 news stories for every swine flu death compared to 0.1 news stories for every TB death.

Fast forward to today and, as far as the news-to-death ratio is concerned, nothing has changed.

There is a peculiar arithmetic that governs modern health reporting, one that has very little to do with actual risk. Hans Rosling captured it neatly during the 2009 swine flu episode, when he calculated a “news-to-death ratio” of 8,176-to-1. In other words, for every death attributed to swine flu, there were over eight thousand news stories. Tuberculosis, by contrast, received less than 0.1 news stories per death over the same period....<<<Read More>>>....

Unless you sweep mouse droppings in New Mexico, you have no chance of contracting hantavirus

 Public health messaging around the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak has been, “there is an extremely low risk to the general public.” This is misleading, some might say it is misinformation.

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>>>...