Covid was a collective trauma. I was based in Berlin then and still remember the day Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor at the time, announced the lockdown. The rest is history: Home-schooling, masks, PCR tests, apocalyptically empty airports, the stories of friends’ parents passing away alone in hospitals and care homes. It was hard.
Which is why recent reports of two other virus outbreaks — hantavirus and Ebola — are so triggering. Is this the next Covid, a friend asked me. It isn’t. But my colleague Apoorva Mandavilli, a science and global health reporter, explains why that is not exactly a reason to relax.
Are we ready for a potential pandemic?
By Apoorva Mandavilli
For many people, the past month has brought unpleasant echoes of Covid: Mysterious deaths aboard a cruise ship, a virus that causes a deadly respiratory illness and talk of forced quarantines. Before it had even become clear to scientists that the recent outbreak of hantavirus was not going to cause another pandemic, there was news of a rapidly escalating Ebola outbreak in central Africa, with hundreds of suspected cases and dozens of deaths.
Neither of these outbreaks is likely to ravage the world as the coronavirus did. The hantavirus can cause severe illness and death, but it’s not particularly contagious and tends to fizzle out. The Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo is scarier, but even that is likely to stay confined, for the most part, to Congo and its immediate neighbors, according to the World Health Organization.
Still, together, they remind us all that outbreaks are inevitable and that the world needs to prepare to snuff them out before they turn into pandemics. This was among the most pressing issues on the minds of health officials from all over the world who gathered last week for the annual meeting of the W.H.O.
