YOU'RE DOING IT AGAIN

I’m watching doctors, nurses, and epidemiologists, as well as science communicators and folks in the news business, offer flatly wrong, wildly misleading, or just seriously outdated information about hantavirus and the outbreak cluster they are struggling to contain. So many, certainly all serious professionals responding seriously, are not even up to date or aligned with the most basic public information sheet from the CDC "About Hantavirus", for example, or with what the WHO was telling us about this specific situation, even three days ago now. It's disgusting. It's especially bad because effectively all of this communication travesty could be mitigated just by clearly citing specific, long-standing, high-quality sources, of which there are plenty.

These people are taking to social media in their capacity as medical professionals, public health experts, and those charged with informing the public largely to comfort people that the situation is nothing to worry about or at least not yet a serious concern. To do so they’re recording and sharing videos of themselves, on public record, telling people the virus only transmits via rat waste. They’re telling us the virus has an incubation period of just a few weeks, rather than up to eight. They’re either seriously overstating or otherwise understating the lethality of the virus in question. They’re claiming the outbreak is contained to the ship. They’re offering that there are only a dozen people who left the ship. They’re telling the public there are people being watched but no suspected or confirmed cases among those dozens of people who boarded regular flights and flew home, doubtless over many hours while packed in with a hundred or more other passengers, and to every continent but Antarctica. And they’re either ignorant of or actually telling us there are no confirmed cases outside of the passenger population.

The most maddening thing is that they’re doing all this, sharing their bad information 24 or even 48 hours after entirely contrary details are known and when good, up-to-date information is easily available. That's so nauseating.

If you want to know something about this situation and hantavirus go look at a study of the last outbreak titled "'Super-Spreaders' and Person-to-Person Transmission of Andes Virus in Argentina" by Martínez et al and published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020.