This grace and sanity is why I love YLE so much. I have not been worried about hantavirus. But I am deeply worried about the lingering trauma from COVID and the erosion of trust between Americans and in American institutions.
I'm writing this from home in Mexico and this is not just an American reality. We here are facing the same, if not worse, erosion of trust in government institutions that have been gutted and politicized by the current regime. There is MUCH healing that needs to be done but we run fo the mill citizens feel alone and abandoned by leadership. It emains to be seen how the future will unfold.
This is an amazing analysis and even speaks to a foundational problem we have: the regime in power, fully authoritarian and likely fascist, has as its over-arching goal the breakdown of public trust in any expert and authentically authoritative source of real information. These "enemies" of the regime include the entire scientific community, educational institutions at all levels, religious authorities that disagree with regime pronouncements and even what's left of our once functioning government. The regime's aim is to remove any voice other than that of the "leader". THIS is our number one public health threat. Authoritarians make every aspect of life political and this is no exception. While we marshal our forces to fill the information gap (a critically important effort) we must work relentlessly to win in November.
I am so glad to see an acknowledgment of the effects of buried trauma with regard to the pandemic. I've been thinking and writing about it several times over the past year. As a society we have never mourned for all we lost during the pandemic. It marked a sea change in the way we do our daily business. We lost loved ones, favorite places, routines, the habit of social interaction as integral to our daily functioning, and so much more. My thought was that we need a national day of mourning with leaders talking about it. The extraordinary absence of reference in public discourse to the disruption caused by the pandemic and the social and business changes it accelerated has been something we ought not to ignore any longer. I think this is a public health matter that could go a long way toward healing some of those wounds that we have scabbed over with no interior effect at all on the wound itself.
I agree with you. We have walked away from the pandemic as if it occurred about the time of the "Spanish Flu". BTW, society walked away from that one too. I was pretty well educated as a child, teenager and college student, but it wasn't until Covid arrived that I learned much of anything about that period. The only memory I have of it from my early years was being puzzled about my mother's concern that I had, or might catch the flu. I was puzzled because lots of children got it and it wasn't a big deal. She recoiled when I said that and told me, "oh it can be very dangerous - like the Spanish flu. Only time I ever learned that there was something called the Spanish flu and that it was deadly - I had heard and read more about the Black Plague. We are doing that now with Covid - full speed ahead and never look back! Let's try to learn from our mistakes. And let's not become the open-minded "flat-earthers" vs the globe shaped world. There was patronization from authorities that rankled, but didn't kill and there was ignorance and anger that did.
The WHO in this instance showed it is an important and sometime helpful, inspiring organization. I still remember that, like all organizations, it is a bureaucracy that refused to admit its error about how Covid is spread for months and months after a group of eminent scientists published a letter urging them to reexamine their guidance on the matter. Finally, WHO changed its advice without even acknowledging that it had made any mistake. I hope that hubris and condescension and unwillingness to be open to the facts and admit to doubts so as to not be embarrassed by changing knowledge has been overcome. This event seems to suggest it may have.
It seems to me that the major pandemic threats to the United States are the insane policies, and the outright lies, of President DJT & Secretary RFK JR.
What I find puzzling, however, is that I’ve heard nothing about what cruise ship lines are doing, to ensure that their vessels are less likely to become either incubators or transporters for pandemic viruses.
A good program. I think it should be publicized much more. But today, that would probably bring the crazies out - "more government overreach". Wish it had more teeth in it and re-inspections of prior violators and heavy fines. Maybe require shipping lines to publish their scores in their ads. I wonder how many (and as a percentage) of ships failed the checks and still were allowed to set sail.
Thank you for writing and acknowledging that the social and cultural residue from covid–2020 remains and is percolating just below the surface. When socializing with many people the wife and I find that covid has been swept under the rug of experience much like a bad first date.
I suspect this is one reason Mr Trump was elected a second time… many people wanted a return to 2019, as if 2020 had never existed. Like in a basketball game have the ref's reset the clock to just before the foul and play on from there. Maybe this is what our CURRENT CDC and HHS learned from covid… to keep the masses happy and disengaged keep your mouths shut and fly below the radar. We don't need no stinkin' information. We'll see how long this can last with a virus with a 50% kill rate and no known – as yet – treatment.
The following link is what the NM state health department DOES know about hanta virus there, where it is endemic. Scroll down a bit for year by year infection and mortality numbers. In theory, every one in the state is at risk for it every year. Whether someone dies from it is largely due to whether they are diagnosed and treated quickly. Unfortunately, the early symptoms are generic so sometimes people wait too long for diagnosis and treatment.
Thank you Joan—I am in the same boat. Well, we ALL are in the same boat, but only the vulnerable and their caretakers recognize it and mitigate for it. Such dismissal of a swath of the population. The article is impressive in its clarity, but I don’t understand how expert PH folks can say “after the pandemic”. The pandemic is not over. People couldn’t / can’t bear it anymore, so that makes it “over” (along with a 2023 declaration of it from leadership), I get that. I still follow Dr. Jetelina’s writings closely, but it is so disheartening to have so many trusted Epi’s move on. I have true trepidation for our society 10 years from now, as the mass disabling event that is Long Covid can no longer be denied. I wish it weren’t so. But that doesn’t make it not so. Take good care ❤️
COVID continues to circulate worldwide. It has now become “endemic” which means that it is always here. As you said, it has not gone away. The change from pandemic to endemic was predicted, with acknowledgment of ongoing health burdens to society and individuals. The declaration of an “end of pandemic” is a legal designation. It does not mean, and was never meant to mean, that COVID is gone.
Your comment that we don't trust people to quarantine responsibly really hit home with me, as one who has spent a lot of time on cruise ships. I still wear masks everywhere I go, because I can't afford to catch anything serious, and because I don't trust people to refrain from spreading diseases. And I really appreciate your conclusions about what we, as a society, need to do. You've made me glad that I have nothing to do with social media.
Thank you for this, Katelyn. Beautifully stated and so important. On a note more specific to this virus, I’ve now heard 3 well-respected hantavirus researchers state that they agree that the pandemic potential is extremely low, we DON’T fully understand the transmission kinetics of the Andes variant in humans, but that it is definitely airborne and may not always require prolonged close contact. It’s déjà vu all over again. The current administration’s public-facing health reps cannot utter the 3 relevant words here: We don’t know. There’s never been a documented hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship. It’s a golden opportunity to learn, but our current administration is firmly committed to reassuring us while keeping us (and itself) in the dark. What are they doing in Nebraska to add to our understanding of this virus in humans? How are those poor, frightened people doing? Where is the CDC director? Oh wait…there isn’t one.
"We don’t know." You've nailed it. Arrogance masked in "professional", scientific garb. The only excuse is that they don't want to create panics. But they can say "we don't think it's a major threat and here's why. But we don't know for sure, because it's not been studied much and we'll advise you if and when we know more. Science is always changing." TREAT PEOPLE LIKE ADULTS AND THEY WILL RESPECT YOU AND YOUR ADVICE.
I had to look up R0 -- Dr Google said, "The basic reproduction number (R0), also called the basic reproduction ratio or rate or the basic reproductive rate, is an epidemiologic metric used to describe the contagiousness or transmissibility of infectious agents. R0 is affected by numerous biological, sociobehavioral, and environmental factors that govern pathogen transmission and, therefore, is usually estimated with various types of complex mathematical models, which make R0 easily misrepresented, misinterpreted, and misapplied. R0 is not a biological constant for a pathogen, a rate over time, or a measure of disease severity, and R0 cannot be modified through vaccination campaigns. R0 is rarely measured directly, and modeled R0 values are dependent on model structures and assumptions. Some R0 values reported in the scientific literature are likely obsolete. R0 must be estimated, reported, and applied with great caution because this basic metric is far from simple." https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/25/1/17-1901_article
Thanks very much for clarifying this. Dr. Google wasn't so helpful to me because it didn't even mention this meaning among others when I looked at the initial page.
100% this. My daughter came home from school upset about the “haunted virus” which is actually spot on. I assured her that I pay attention and read and if I start giving her a mask to wear then she knows that we have to be concerned. That seemed to assuage her fears. But I’m worried and I’m exhausted. I don’t trust most sources online except your newsletter and Force of Infection. I try to stay on top of articles in the Washington Post and the NYT. It would be nice though to have confidence in the federal government. I trust my state leader, and county leaders, but viruses don’t respect county and state lines. It continues to be an exhausting time to be alive. Thank you for your continued thoughtful coverage.
Well done! 5 specific points anchoring the issues we must work on to rebuild trust and effective public health security. At least the WHO has broken out of its ivory tower and bureaucracy to try to speak with professional compassion from the front line.
I'm a medical communicator who in the 90s was at the center of the discovery of the Sin Nombre strain of hantavirus in NM. This does not in any sense make me a hantavirus expert--and yet, I too have been flooded with emails and texts from people worried about the implication of the M/V Hondius Andes variant outbreak. What is striking to me, is that these are well-educated people who, in theory, would know how to find reliable information. But while they know CDC is now useless, what surprises me is they no longer seek reliable sources (WHO, Brown University Pandemic Center, CIDRAP, YLE). It seems to be a lack of trust not only for government, but really any systematic organized institution.
They come to me, I explain this ongoing situation exactly as it would be explained by any medical doctor with epidemiology/biostatistics background who knows how to translate into "everyday" language. I give them essentially no information that isn't available at YLE and many other sources -- but me, they trust. Why? What makes them take my word when there are actual experts who have shared a consensus opinion based on all the evidence?
Our brains are wired to rely on anecdote. Science and reason counteract the harm of relying on anecdote. But with the U.S. war on science and reason, I fear we've returned to that atavistic stage of hominid understanding of the external world. The new age of knowledge by anecdote.
I think we can call out the media more, not just social media. Even just basic cable news, they used every opportunity to breathlessly ask if this was the next pandemic. No nuance, just endless speculation. And it works for them- they get clicks and views. I think we need to be more aggressive in shutting down that speculation and calling out when media is being sensationalist.
This grace and sanity is why I love YLE so much. I have not been worried about hantavirus. But I am deeply worried about the lingering trauma from COVID and the erosion of trust between Americans and in American institutions.
I'm writing this from home in Mexico and this is not just an American reality. We here are facing the same, if not worse, erosion of trust in government institutions that have been gutted and politicized by the current regime. There is MUCH healing that needs to be done but we run fo the mill citizens feel alone and abandoned by leadership. It emains to be seen how the future will unfold.
This is an amazing analysis and even speaks to a foundational problem we have: the regime in power, fully authoritarian and likely fascist, has as its over-arching goal the breakdown of public trust in any expert and authentically authoritative source of real information. These "enemies" of the regime include the entire scientific community, educational institutions at all levels, religious authorities that disagree with regime pronouncements and even what's left of our once functioning government. The regime's aim is to remove any voice other than that of the "leader". THIS is our number one public health threat. Authoritarians make every aspect of life political and this is no exception. While we marshal our forces to fill the information gap (a critically important effort) we must work relentlessly to win in November.
Very well said. I wish more people understood this.
I am so glad to see an acknowledgment of the effects of buried trauma with regard to the pandemic. I've been thinking and writing about it several times over the past year. As a society we have never mourned for all we lost during the pandemic. It marked a sea change in the way we do our daily business. We lost loved ones, favorite places, routines, the habit of social interaction as integral to our daily functioning, and so much more. My thought was that we need a national day of mourning with leaders talking about it. The extraordinary absence of reference in public discourse to the disruption caused by the pandemic and the social and business changes it accelerated has been something we ought not to ignore any longer. I think this is a public health matter that could go a long way toward healing some of those wounds that we have scabbed over with no interior effect at all on the wound itself.
Babette Fraser Hale
I agree with you. We have walked away from the pandemic as if it occurred about the time of the "Spanish Flu". BTW, society walked away from that one too. I was pretty well educated as a child, teenager and college student, but it wasn't until Covid arrived that I learned much of anything about that period. The only memory I have of it from my early years was being puzzled about my mother's concern that I had, or might catch the flu. I was puzzled because lots of children got it and it wasn't a big deal. She recoiled when I said that and told me, "oh it can be very dangerous - like the Spanish flu. Only time I ever learned that there was something called the Spanish flu and that it was deadly - I had heard and read more about the Black Plague. We are doing that now with Covid - full speed ahead and never look back! Let's try to learn from our mistakes. And let's not become the open-minded "flat-earthers" vs the globe shaped world. There was patronization from authorities that rankled, but didn't kill and there was ignorance and anger that did.
Thank you ! The WHO makes our HHS organization look like a bunch of amateur wannabes. Oh, wait, that is what they are.
The WHO in this instance showed it is an important and sometime helpful, inspiring organization. I still remember that, like all organizations, it is a bureaucracy that refused to admit its error about how Covid is spread for months and months after a group of eminent scientists published a letter urging them to reexamine their guidance on the matter. Finally, WHO changed its advice without even acknowledging that it had made any mistake. I hope that hubris and condescension and unwillingness to be open to the facts and admit to doubts so as to not be embarrassed by changing knowledge has been overcome. This event seems to suggest it may have.
It seems to me that the major pandemic threats to the United States are the insane policies, and the outright lies, of President DJT & Secretary RFK JR.
What I find puzzling, however, is that I’ve heard nothing about what cruise ship lines are doing, to ensure that their vessels are less likely to become either incubators or transporters for pandemic viruses.
https://www.travelresearchonline.com/blog/index.php/2026/03/the-cdcs-vessel-sanitation-program/
A good program. I think it should be publicized much more. But today, that would probably bring the crazies out - "more government overreach". Wish it had more teeth in it and re-inspections of prior violators and heavy fines. Maybe require shipping lines to publish their scores in their ads. I wonder how many (and as a percentage) of ships failed the checks and still were allowed to set sail.
Thank you for writing and acknowledging that the social and cultural residue from covid–2020 remains and is percolating just below the surface. When socializing with many people the wife and I find that covid has been swept under the rug of experience much like a bad first date.
I suspect this is one reason Mr Trump was elected a second time… many people wanted a return to 2019, as if 2020 had never existed. Like in a basketball game have the ref's reset the clock to just before the foul and play on from there. Maybe this is what our CURRENT CDC and HHS learned from covid… to keep the masses happy and disengaged keep your mouths shut and fly below the radar. We don't need no stinkin' information. We'll see how long this can last with a virus with a 50% kill rate and no known – as yet – treatment.
You have it so right! Human beings like to blot out unpleasant memories. Otherwise it's harder to enjoy life. "Ignorance is bliss".
The following link is what the NM state health department DOES know about hanta virus there, where it is endemic. Scroll down a bit for year by year infection and mortality numbers. In theory, every one in the state is at risk for it every year. Whether someone dies from it is largely due to whether they are diagnosed and treated quickly. Unfortunately, the early symptoms are generic so sometimes people wait too long for diagnosis and treatment.
https://www.nmhealth.org/about/erd/ideb/zdp/hps/
One more thing about covid - for too many of us, it never left.
Thank you Joan—I am in the same boat. Well, we ALL are in the same boat, but only the vulnerable and their caretakers recognize it and mitigate for it. Such dismissal of a swath of the population. The article is impressive in its clarity, but I don’t understand how expert PH folks can say “after the pandemic”. The pandemic is not over. People couldn’t / can’t bear it anymore, so that makes it “over” (along with a 2023 declaration of it from leadership), I get that. I still follow Dr. Jetelina’s writings closely, but it is so disheartening to have so many trusted Epi’s move on. I have true trepidation for our society 10 years from now, as the mass disabling event that is Long Covid can no longer be denied. I wish it weren’t so. But that doesn’t make it not so. Take good care ❤️
COVID continues to circulate worldwide. It has now become “endemic” which means that it is always here. As you said, it has not gone away. The change from pandemic to endemic was predicted, with acknowledgment of ongoing health burdens to society and individuals. The declaration of an “end of pandemic” is a legal designation. It does not mean, and was never meant to mean, that COVID is gone.
Your comment that we don't trust people to quarantine responsibly really hit home with me, as one who has spent a lot of time on cruise ships. I still wear masks everywhere I go, because I can't afford to catch anything serious, and because I don't trust people to refrain from spreading diseases. And I really appreciate your conclusions about what we, as a society, need to do. You've made me glad that I have nothing to do with social media.
The MSM aren't an awful lot more reliable. Bring back Walter Cronkite!
Agreed. In our house we watched Huntley & Brinkley rather than Cronkite, but same difference. Those were the good old days.
Thank you for this, Katelyn. Beautifully stated and so important. On a note more specific to this virus, I’ve now heard 3 well-respected hantavirus researchers state that they agree that the pandemic potential is extremely low, we DON’T fully understand the transmission kinetics of the Andes variant in humans, but that it is definitely airborne and may not always require prolonged close contact. It’s déjà vu all over again. The current administration’s public-facing health reps cannot utter the 3 relevant words here: We don’t know. There’s never been a documented hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship. It’s a golden opportunity to learn, but our current administration is firmly committed to reassuring us while keeping us (and itself) in the dark. What are they doing in Nebraska to add to our understanding of this virus in humans? How are those poor, frightened people doing? Where is the CDC director? Oh wait…there isn’t one.
"We don’t know." You've nailed it. Arrogance masked in "professional", scientific garb. The only excuse is that they don't want to create panics. But they can say "we don't think it's a major threat and here's why. But we don't know for sure, because it's not been studied much and we'll advise you if and when we know more. Science is always changing." TREAT PEOPLE LIKE ADULTS AND THEY WILL RESPECT YOU AND YOUR ADVICE.
I had to look up R0 -- Dr Google said, "The basic reproduction number (R0), also called the basic reproduction ratio or rate or the basic reproductive rate, is an epidemiologic metric used to describe the contagiousness or transmissibility of infectious agents. R0 is affected by numerous biological, sociobehavioral, and environmental factors that govern pathogen transmission and, therefore, is usually estimated with various types of complex mathematical models, which make R0 easily misrepresented, misinterpreted, and misapplied. R0 is not a biological constant for a pathogen, a rate over time, or a measure of disease severity, and R0 cannot be modified through vaccination campaigns. R0 is rarely measured directly, and modeled R0 values are dependent on model structures and assumptions. Some R0 values reported in the scientific literature are likely obsolete. R0 must be estimated, reported, and applied with great caution because this basic metric is far from simple." https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/25/1/17-1901_article
Thanks!
Thanks very much for clarifying this. Dr. Google wasn't so helpful to me because it didn't even mention this meaning among others when I looked at the initial page.
Part of the problem is that R0 looks so much like RO.
100% this. My daughter came home from school upset about the “haunted virus” which is actually spot on. I assured her that I pay attention and read and if I start giving her a mask to wear then she knows that we have to be concerned. That seemed to assuage her fears. But I’m worried and I’m exhausted. I don’t trust most sources online except your newsletter and Force of Infection. I try to stay on top of articles in the Washington Post and the NYT. It would be nice though to have confidence in the federal government. I trust my state leader, and county leaders, but viruses don’t respect county and state lines. It continues to be an exhausting time to be alive. Thank you for your continued thoughtful coverage.
Superb. Thank you
YLE is demonstrating how to lead our system back to functionality. Thank you for the clarity of your communication.
Well done! 5 specific points anchoring the issues we must work on to rebuild trust and effective public health security. At least the WHO has broken out of its ivory tower and bureaucracy to try to speak with professional compassion from the front line.
I'm a medical communicator who in the 90s was at the center of the discovery of the Sin Nombre strain of hantavirus in NM. This does not in any sense make me a hantavirus expert--and yet, I too have been flooded with emails and texts from people worried about the implication of the M/V Hondius Andes variant outbreak. What is striking to me, is that these are well-educated people who, in theory, would know how to find reliable information. But while they know CDC is now useless, what surprises me is they no longer seek reliable sources (WHO, Brown University Pandemic Center, CIDRAP, YLE). It seems to be a lack of trust not only for government, but really any systematic organized institution.
They come to me, I explain this ongoing situation exactly as it would be explained by any medical doctor with epidemiology/biostatistics background who knows how to translate into "everyday" language. I give them essentially no information that isn't available at YLE and many other sources -- but me, they trust. Why? What makes them take my word when there are actual experts who have shared a consensus opinion based on all the evidence?
Our brains are wired to rely on anecdote. Science and reason counteract the harm of relying on anecdote. But with the U.S. war on science and reason, I fear we've returned to that atavistic stage of hominid understanding of the external world. The new age of knowledge by anecdote.
Great analysis!
I think we can call out the media more, not just social media. Even just basic cable news, they used every opportunity to breathlessly ask if this was the next pandemic. No nuance, just endless speculation. And it works for them- they get clicks and views. I think we need to be more aggressive in shutting down that speculation and calling out when media is being sensationalist.