Hantavirus and the next pandemic

This was originally a much longer post analyzing Martinez et al. (2020), which reports on the 2018–2019 outbreak of the Andes strain of the Hantavirus in a small municipality in Argentina. However, that draft didn’t quite come together, so I’m releasing this shortened post instead.

Two grounded takes I read on the pandemic potential of hantavirus in the past two days have come from epidemiologist Gideon M-K and forecaster Peter Wildeford. You can certainly quibble with some of their assertions given the uncertainty we have about the transmission characteristics of the Andes strain (and this outbreak in particular). But based on what we know so far, this outbreak is very unlikely to become a widespread public health event. Hantavirus does not appear to have the characteristics needed for explosive growth, and the potentially exposed passengers seem to be under meaningful surveillance, even if the containment response has not been perfect.

While this attitude may seem dismissive given the similar sang-froid the public health establishment exhibited very early in the COVID-19 pandemic (and I include myself in that statement), this comparison only goes so far. There are genuine differences between what we know about the pandemic potential of hantaviruses now and what we knew about coronaviruses in the early days of COVID-19.

That being said, I don’t think we should be complacent about the overall risk of a pandemic as bad as or worse than COVID-19 in the coming years and decades. Our biomedical tools (e.g., mRNA vaccines) may be sharper than ever, but as a society we have not done nearly enough to grapple with our response to the last pandemic. Instead of confronting our failures directly, we have largely chosen to move on. My fear is that our civilizational capacity to respond to another global pandemic has been badly depleted.