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Covid and Public Health Establishment Work Together to Make Next Pandemic More Likely

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Public health officials keep providing reasons that Hantavirus is has historically been more “forgiving” than Covid.

Yet these same officials, many of whom were involved in the let er rip strategy for Covid, are also lying about or are uninformed about basic facts regarding Hantavirus. For example, the CDC says it requires prolonged personal contact (whatever that is exactly). But that’s not true. There is evidence of past human-to-human airborne transmission among individuals who attended social gatherings with an infected person present. And there are strong arguments that the current outbreak does not require prolonged personal contact to spread:

Many of the reassurances revolve around the fact that Hantavirus is not a novel virus as it dates back to 1993. While that may be true it is also playing on a completely new field created by the Covid-19 and how Hantavirus behaved in the past is not predictive of how it will be now or in the future. Due to that uncertainty, many advise public health departments to operate under the precautionary principle, which justifies anticipatory action to prevent the occurrence of harm despite incomplete scientific evidence.

Thus far the positive tests have been limited to those on the cruise ship, but that doesn’t mean it will stay that way:

As we wait to see if more cases emerge from contact with the cruise passengers, among the uncertainties that demand the precautionary principle is the question of whether Covid-19 has made Hantavirus more transmissible:

The argument is that people with repeated COVID infections have damaged immune systems, which makes it more likely that they can pick up a disease with a lower viral load than without the COVID infections. Here is a fairly long list of studies finding that COVID damages the immune system, leading some to conclude the following:

And:

A 2012 paper in Advances in Virology found that Hantavirus shuts down your immune system by preventing it from making interferon: COVID, of course, dysregulates interferon response.

The interferon connection, if there is one, is above my pay grade. But what’s clear is that basing predictions on how Hantavirus will behave on past pre-Covid experiences is planning for the best-case scenario when the situation demands the opposite.

For example, the reproductive number (R0) of Hantavirus is roughly two, meaning one infected individual could be expected to pass it on to two other people. Others argue it is higher:

The R0 depends on a wide range of circumstances. For one, it is based on past outbreaks prior to Covid dysregulating global immune systems. Even if we are operating under the assumption that Hantavirus will behave the same way it did in the past, the R0 number from a 2018 Argentina outbreak was brought down to zero with stringent precautionary measures:

So any public health official or infectious disease expert advising calm should theoretically be encouraging similar measures. Yet, it would appear they instead expect that R0 to come down to zero without the stringent measures imposed in Argentina in 2018.

So not only do we have a refusal to take necessary precautions, the public health establishment is still alergic to accepting inhalation transmission:

And there is an inability to understand/refusal to publicly admit that the world has changed, particularly with regards to Covid’s effects on global immune systems, but also in other ways:

***

Regardless of whether Hantavirus, aided by Covid, goes pandemic, Covid itself continues to kill hundreds of thousands of people per year and help other viruses do more damage.

Even the Daily Mail (!) last week admitted that Covid is likely helping to cause a resurgence in meningitis:

When people regularly catch meningitis B bacteria, they usually live harmlessly in the nose – with around 25 per cent of teenagers and young adults hosting these bugs.

The problem is, Dr Edwards says, that Covid may have made our cells more susceptible to the bacteria.

‘The Covid virus gets inside cells by binding to its receptors,’ she explained.

‘When this happens, this gives bacteria a chance to also get into the cells – which is why many Covid patients caught secondary bacterial infections like pneumonia.

‘It’s possible that many of these young people developing meningitis now may have previously had Covid, and this has left their cells more vulnerable to infections.’ 

Yes, it’s certainly possible, as it is with a variety of other illnesses, but the ruling class commands we soldier on. Covid and its lasting damage disproportionately affect working class communities, of course, but you’d hardly know it.

Now that such “return to normal” policies of mass infection have been normalized, would even a Hantavirus with a death rate of 40 percent cause a change in approach or would the ruling class hunker down while the working class is forced to keep the economy running?

Hantavirus is yet another opportunity to reset approach to airborne risk, as some are urging in The BMJ:

The multinational outbreak of Andes hantavirus (ANDV) linked to cruise ship travel should prompt the World Health Organization (WHO) to change its default response to the risk of airborne transmission of the virus. Hantavirus is a pathogen with documented person-to-person transmission and high case fatality. Therefore, the starting point should not be to downplay the risk of airborne transmission until it is definitively proven. The starting point should be the immediate adoption of precautionary measures to reduce airborne transmission, such as respirator use by healthcare workers, cases, and close contacts; ventilation optimisation; avoidance of unfiltered air recirculation; and portable HEPA (high efficiency particulate air) filtration in all enclosed quarantine and transport settings.

That is not happening. And so even if this Hantavirus mini outbreak is magically contained, the warning signs are flashing red:

As outbreaks worsen and become more common due to climate change and other factors, not only are we unprepared, but the public health establishment is actively aiding the viruses.

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9 comments

  1. Samuel Conner

    Perhaps public health officials’ complacency is related to the concept that R0 will decline as the population density falls.

    /s

    We are not a rational species in the way we tend to think of “rationality” as being “how decisions are made”. We use our rationality to justify what we want to do based on non-rational considerations.

    Perhaps we’ll get to see Milei’s approach to pandemic

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  2. Ignacio

    With Covid19 it was seen quite early that a single mutation in the spike protein could result in noticeable… er… remarkable changes in estimates of virus transmissibility. This might be or might not be the case for Hantavirus. We don’t know. Since here we are talking about a different set of viral and receptor proteins involved, one can expect something different this time (for better or for worse). In any case, Covid19 showed us that the precautionary principle must be applied with any new virus, and in particular, any new virus entering through the respiratory system. Risks are huge! Let’s for instance suppose that acquiring high transmissibility requires not one but few or several mutations and it is then less likely with Hanta than with Corona. Given that there have been several small outbreaks of ANDV and that, so far, none of them have resulted in a pandemic it may well be the case. Yet, we don’t want to play with probabilities to check this and talk about more or less forgiveness, longer or shorter incubation periods, lower or higher pathogenicity does not help. The better measures to control early each outbreak, the lower the probabilities of a pandemic.

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    1. vao

      “the precautionary principle must be applied with any new virus, and in particular, any new virus entering through the respiratory system”

      Indeed, but see what argument is being put forth:

      “Many of the reassurances revolve around the fact that Hantavirus is not a novel virus as it dates back to 1993.”

      Hantavirus has been known for a full generation, hence it is not novel, therefore no need to batten down the hatches. I expect the same attitude to prevail whenever H5N1 finally mutates into a human-pandemic-inducing strain. At that point we may hear that “Covid is mild, Hantavirus is forgiving, H5N1 is benign”. The lesson: TPTB really, absolutely do not want to do anything to prevent, or even to fight those illnesses. We are reaching the point where there truly is no such thing as a society — Margaret Thatcher has won.

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      1. Ignacio

        Not novel? It is still novel in the sense that an enormously large set of the population (>99,99%) haven’t been ever infected with Hantavirus, thus without specific immune protection. The fact that it was detected for the first time years or decades ago only suggests that not every new virus outbreak must become pandemic but each of those ANDV outbreaks since 1993 (or before undetected) has indeed been a novel virus again and again.

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        1. vao

          I agree fully, I just wanted to point out that the establishment pulls out all stops — including the aforementioned disingenuous arguments — to deny the threat posed by Hantavirus (or any other virus) and hence to avoid taking the necessary provisions to counter it.

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          1. Ignacio

            I replied before reading in full your last paragraph incensed by the second quote in your reply. My bad!

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  3. Rui

    I’m currently a resident in Public Health. It is virtually impossible to discuss COVID-19 and airborne transmission. The only disease where airborne transmission is understood is measles. People around me think I’m a mask fanatic because I still use a FFP2 respirator as if the pandemic hadn’t ended and an extremist for calling the Who response to both Covid and now Hantavirus shameful. This winter the flu did the rounds in my department, virtually no precautions by anyone.
    We have close to zero chance of stopping whatever comes next that has asymptomatic spread, is airborne and has a significant reproductive rate.

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  4. Tom Stone

    The good news is that ANDV only affects people who don’t matter.
    It simply won’t be allowed to cross the border of the Hamptons and there will be wonderful opportunities to make Money as the population “Right Sizes”.
    With Men like RFK Jr, Jay Battacharya and the inimitable Dr OZ in charge of Public Health, what could go wrong?

    Reply ↓

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