Even as the world moves past COVID-19’s emergency phase, AP reports that the pandemic’s effects still shape how people interpret new illness alerts—particularly when they involve outbreaks with the potential to spread beyond a limited group. In recent days, fear has resurfaced around a rare hantavirus outbreak tied to a cruise ship, with some residents questioning whether the risk is truly under control despite reassurances from officials.

AP said the lingering COVID-era backdrop is visible in everyday habits that remain from the pandemic, while other “ripples” sit more inside people—such as grief, chronic health conditions and the sense that lives were interrupted. In this story, the new trigger is the hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship, and the response is colored by what people learned to expect from health threats after COVID-19.

Elisa Jayne Bienenstock, a research professor and sociologist at Arizona State University, focused on how COVID-19 affected trust. She said, “COVID undermined our trust in what most of us used to trust,” and asked what people look to when “general trust goes down” and “there’s a lot of cynicism.” She added that when people fear things, many want a definitive answer, but “science doesn’t provide that when it doesn’t know.”

AP said that before 2020, the outbreak of an illness somewhere often did not trigger large concern outside the specific areas affected, even though some epidemics caused significant numbers of deaths. It attributed some of that earlier containment of concern to fewer travel opportunities for many people, which helped limit disease spread in ways that became central to how COVID-19 moved.

The hantavirus outbreak did not arrive in a vacuum: AP said the current strain of hantavirus has circulated in South American countries across decades, including a 1997 outbreak in Chile, and the U.S. has seen illnesses such as West Nile and Legionnaire’s in other years. But in a post-COVID-19 environment, AP reported, questions and concerns followed early reports that three people had died from hantavirus on the cruise ship, and WHO later reported cases linked to the incident.

AP said that after passengers were taken to Spain’s Canary Islands for disembarkation—on the Spanish island of Tenerife—some residents remained uneasy. Resident Samantha Aguero said, “We feel a bit unsafe. We don’t feel as there are 100% security measures in place to welcome it,” adding that “This is a virus, after all,” and referencing how people lived through it during the pandemic.

AP also reported on what Bienenstock described as three institutions that have taken a hit from public mistrust: government, media and science itself. She said the mistrust of science gained momentum not because scientists were making mistakes, but because nonscientists did not share the same understanding of how science works. She said, “Most people don’t think of science as a process,” and described how that view can make public confidence wobble when “facts showed that they weren’t 100% reliable and assured.”

The article also quoted Michele Gelfand, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, about the uneven way COVID-era threat sensitivity may have taken hold. She said, “COVID … didn’t just heighten people’s sensitivity to health threats. It did so unevenly, in ways often disconnected from actual risk,” and added that as trust in institutions weakens, people lose “a key way to navigate uncertainty together.” Gelfand said without that backbone, people rely more on “rumor, fear, and emotion,” which can lead to “overreact[ing] to small risks and underreact[ing] to serious ones.”

AP included a personal example from Karlynn Morgan, a 76-year-old retired nurse-anesthetist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who said the heightened attention has included more discussion of health threats from people without a medical or science background than before the pandemic. She also said she has been disturbed by what she sees as less trust in science, pointing to “falling vaccination rates and rising instances of diseases like measles.” Morgan said, “I think people are far less trusting because people used to take their children and just get the vaccine,” and added, “When I was a kid, there was no question you were going to go get your shot.”

In response to the question of what would help rebuild trust, Gelfand said in an email that leaders must get involved. She said leaders “set the threat signal” by determining whether people receive accurate information about danger or “distorted information that serves a political agenda.” She argued that when leaders send “clear, honest signals,” people can calibrate their response to threats, but when leaders “manipulate threat for their own purposes, norms erode and and trust collapses,” adding that “Strong, reliable institutions have historically been our superpower as a society.”

AP reported that the World Health Organization said 11 hantavirus cases around the world were linked to the cruise, and that lab testing confirmed eight of the cases. The article said health experts have repeatedly emphasized that while the virus can cause serious illness in those infected, the risk of spread in the general public is low—an assessment that has been met with worry from some communities as the event continues to ripple outward.

At a time when COVID’s effects on trust are still in people’s expectations, AP’s reporting shows how quickly a new outbreak can pull up old assumptions about uncertainty, authority and safety—even when health experts stress the current risk picture is different. The central question, as Bienenstock and Gelfand described it, is less about this single virus than about what happens when trust in the institutions that coordinate shared understanding weakens.

Follow the AP’s coverage of the hantavirus outbreak at https://apnews.com/hub/hantavirus.