‘This Is Not Going to Be the Next COVID’

The MV Hondius, the cruise ship where an outbreak of hantavirus was confirmed over the weekend, is moving once again. On Wednesday, after three people were evacuated, the ship departed from Cabo Verde. By Sunday, it will arrive at the Canary Islands, where the Spanish government says it can dock. So far, though, three people have died in the outbreak, and the ship’s remaining passengers still need to be monitored for illness. Local leaders would rather the ship go somewhere else. And a chorus of TikToks that have each been viewed and liked millions of times call for a different approach: “Sink that ship.”That’s probably (hopefully) a joke. But a perusal of the internet—both the memes and the upswell of concerned armchair epidemiologists—suggests that some people at least semi-sincerely fear that a pandemic is imminent. “I don’t want your rat poo virus. I have summer plans,” one woman posted on TikTok. (Hantavirus infects humans mostly through contact with excretions from infected rodents.) Yesterday, I saw that an old friend had posted on her Instagram story about a patient who had been medically evacuated to a town next to hers in Switzerland. “I just finished mentally recovering from Covid man,” she wrote next to a crying emoji. A new TikTok of a guy doing the Renegade—a dance inextricably linked to the early pandemic and the new influencers it minted—has been watched 20 million times and counting.That people are concerned, or at least keeping an eye on hantavirus, makes sense. But all of the epidemiological evidence so far suggests that the general public has very little to worry about. “This is not going to be the next COVID,” Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Center, in the Netherlands, told me.Hantavirus is a respiratory illness that starts out much like the flu: fever, aches, and chills. In severe cases, breathing becomes difficult, and the heart struggles to pump blood. Andes hantavirus—the species that the World Health Organization confirmed