The world’s reaction to hantavirus is tinged by echoes of something else: COVID

Passengers board a plane bound for Eindhoven, after disembarking from the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship MV Hondius at the airport in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Monday, May 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Arturo Rodriguez,File) 2026-05-14T11:17:04Z NEW YORK (AP) — The lingering impact of COVID-19 , a few years out from the declaration that the pandemic was over, is scattered across how we live today — the work-from-home jobs , the way some have decided wearing masks is their new normal, the hand sanitizer dispensers that remain ever present. Some of the other ripples, though, aren’t as obvious. They’re the ones we carry inside us — grief over lost loved ones, chronic health conditions, the sense of lives interrupted. And in recent days, another one has made itself known in the wake of a rare hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship: the fear, despite official reassurances, that it might be happening again. But the flourishing of fear, whether on a personal or societal level, can also be an indicator that something else is missing. Perhaps there’s no post-pandemic reality more entrenched than the damage done, in the U.S. and globally, to the bonds that in the before times, many would have considered secure — science, government, information itself. “COVID undermined our trust in what most of us used to trust,” said Elisa Jayne Bienenstock, a research professor and sociologist at Arizona State University. “When general trust goes down, when there’s a lot of cynicism, who are people looking to, to explain what to do and how the world works?” What it used to be and what it is now Before 2020, the outbreak of some illness somewhere didn’t usually cause massive concern outside of the specific areas impacted, even as some epidemics caused significant numbers of deaths. Some of that was complacency in the face of a world where widespread travel wasn’t as accessible to the masses as it has become, which was a key part of COVID-19’s spread. In fact, there have been outbreaks of the current strain of hantavirus in some South American countries through the decades, like one in 1997 in Chile. Other countries have had epidemics of a range of illnesses from cholera to dengue to SARS, and the U.S. has seen West Nile , Legionnaire’s and more. But in a post-COVID-19 world, it didn’t take long before questions and concerns surfaced about disease spread in the days immediately following the first reports that three people had died from hantavirus on the ship. A total of nine confirmed and two suspected cases have been identified, including the fatalities. (