The fear and uncertainty surrounding a rare hantavirus outbreak on a Spanish cruise ship is being magnified by the public’s diminished trust in science, government and the media — a lasting legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic that risks eroding collective responses to future health emergencies, experts and residents say.
At least 11 cases of hantavirus have been reported worldwide among passengers and crew, including three deaths, according to the World Health Organization. But health authorities have repeatedly emphasized that the risk to the general public is low, with person-to-person spread of the strain extremely rare. Still, when the ship docked at the Spanish island of Tenerife, local resident Samantha Aguero voiced fears that linger from the pandemic.
“We feel a bit unsafe. We don’t feel as there are 100% security measures in place to welcome it,” she told The Associated Press. “This is a virus, after all, and we have lived this during the pandemic.”
The gap between the scientific assessment of risk and the public’s emotional reaction highlights a tide of institutional mistrust that the pandemic has swollen to levels that experts say hampers rational response to new health threats.
“COVID undermined our trust in what most of us used to trust,” said Elisa Jayne Bienenstock, a research professor and sociologist at Arizona State University, in an interview with the AP. “When general trust goes down, when there’s a lot of cynicism, who are people looking to, to explain what to do and how the world works?”
That question, Bienenstock said, points to a structural problem: most people don’t understand that science is a process, not a set of fixed truths. “One of the problems with COVID is it undermined that confidence in science for people who don’t understand how science works. It showed the process. And it showed that scientists don’t always have the answer,” she said.
“Most people don’t think of science as a process. In their mind, science is an answer, it’s a fact,” she said. “And so when those facts showed that they weren’t 100% reliable and assured, it started undermining trust in the science.”
Michele Gelfand, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, argued that the consequences extend beyond misplaced fear. “As trust in institutions has weakened, people have lost a key way to navigate uncertainty together. Without trust, people rely more on rumor, fear, and emotion, which can lead them to overreact to small risks and underreact to serious ones.”
That dynamic has been noticed by Karlynn Morgan, a 76-year-old retired nurse-anesthetist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She told the AP that more people without a medical background are weighing in on health issues since the pandemic, and that vaccination rates for diseases like measles have fallen as skepticism has risen.
“I think people are far less trusting because people used to take their children and just get the vaccine,” Morgan said. “When I was a kid, there was no question you were going to go get your shot.”
Gelfand called the trusted institutions that many once relied on “our superpower as a society.” Without them, she said, “we lose the very capacity for collective action that has helped human groups survive for millennia.” Leaders, she said, need to send clear signals to help people calibrate threats — a plea that takes on fresh urgency as the public now processes news of a new pathogen.