During any epidemic, the primary question concerns the mode of transmission of the disease. As The Atlantic writes, it is from the answer to this question that the security measures to be adopted, the protections to be put in place and the people to contact during contact tracing will arise. In fact, if the answer is not correct, everything can collapse like a house of cards. The hantavirus, which is starting to shake the planet, is no exception to the rule: as long as we do not know precisely how it is transmitted, it will be very difficult to develop effective solutions.
Will the mistakes made at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic be reproduced? It’s a safe bet that yes, explains the American media, which recalls that in 2020, the American health authorities began by firmly asserting that the virus was spread by contact with contaminated surfaces, while the problem mainly came from enclosed and poorly ventilated spaces, places where contaminated fine particles flourish.
The mistakes of 2020, again
This time again, it seems that the health authorities are starting to talk nonsense. As soon as the recent outbreak noted on the cruise ship MV Hondius in April was revealed to the general public, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) could be heard claiming that the virus was being transmitted “through close and prolonged contact”. Shortly after, it was Mike Waltz, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, who declared that “human-to-human transmission is very rare”.
However, the data meticulously collected at the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019 in Argentina show something else. The Atlantic took the following example: a man goes to a birthday party, sits next to someone infected with hantavirus, contracts it, transmits it to his wife and dies. His wife then infects ten other people during his funeral wake. Another guest at that same party has no contact with the original patient, other than a brief hello as they pass each other, but that person also becomes ill.
Author of the article for The Atlantic and professor of public health at Harvard, Joseph Allen says that the errors linked to Covid-19 are being reproduced. If its working group had demonstrated from the beginning of 2020 that 90% of transmission was by aerosols, the CDC only updated its recommendations at the end of that same year, after several months of confinement and numerous deaths. The same phenomenon could happen again today, he warns.
This outbreak is not expected to turn into a pandemic, mainly because hantavirus is less contagious than influenza, measles and SARS-CoV-2. However, given our lack of experience with this virus, any certainty is an assumption, the author adds. Fortunately, despite sometimes lacking communication, the current system generally works: authorities investigate, passengers are quarantined, seriously ill people are treated and the risk to the general population is low.
International and national health authorities act responsibly; however, what happens next will depend on their ability to communicate effectively about the precautions to take. If the population wrongly believes that transmission is based only on one “close and prolonged contact”she risks taking risks that she will soon regret. In matters of public health even more than elsewhere, communicators would provide us with a valuable service – and would undoubtedly save lives – by admitting their ignorance rather than telling nonsense.
