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Global health emergencies are once again grabbing attention in the United States: recent outbreaks of hantavirus connected to a cruise ship and Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo have prompted fear-filled discussions online and a wave of “pandemic”-related searching. NPR reported that for many Americans, those reactions are being colored by the COVID-19 experience—how a global outbreak could disrupt daily life and raise the stakes far beyond the original location of an outbreak.
Chandra Harvey, an Instagram content creator whose joking video about a possible pandemic drew more than 100,000 views, told NPR that “We’re all dealing with PTSD from COVID.” She said COVID-19 “heavily impacted” her family, with some relatives hospitalized, and added, “COVID scarred all of us.”
NPR also quoted public health experts describing how COVID-19 made people more alert to outbreak risk—and how it altered emotional responses to new pathogens. Dr. Ali S. Khan, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said that early in the COVID-19 pandemic, “you were worried about your friends and neighbors and loved ones dying from COVID,” noting that more than 1 million Americans died of COVID-19.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an infectious disease physician, said there is a “dread factor” with certain diseases even though influenza kills far more people on average than Ebola. He said, “certain diseases spark dread in people,” and NPR reported that the memory of COVID-19 can also push Americans to treat outbreaks as if they will evolve in the same disruptive way.
Adalja said that “the nuances of the biology of different pathogens, the trajectories of different outbreaks, that all gets lost because what [many people are] worried about is having a disruptive event like COVID upend their entire life.” He added that people may be alarmed not only by perceived deadliness and limited treatment options, but also by timing: the two diseases drew attention in the same month, NPR reported.
Experts stressed that Ebola, COVID-19 and hantavirus spread differently, which matters for evaluating how likely a repeat of COVID-19’s broad impact would be. NPR reported that COVID-19 can spread through the air, while Ebola is typically spread through bodily fluids such as vomit or blood. It reported that hantavirus most often spreads to humans through contact with urine, feces or saliva from infected rodents, although NPR said one strain has been identified that can spread from person to person.
In the United States, infectious disease specialists told NPR that the average American should not be concerned about Ebola or hantavirus becoming a repeat of COVID-19. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, told NPR she was “very concerned about the Ebola outbreak as an epidemiologist” but added, “I’m not worried as a mom,” saying she was not expecting Ebola to influence her community or the United States.
NPR reported that Rivers also pointed to everyday steps that can help people manage worry without treating distant outbreaks as inevitable local threats. She said people who are worried can wear a mask and avoid crowded indoor spaces or, if available, vaccinate, and she emphasized that focusing on “those controllables can be helpful.”
The reporting also connected the emotional impact to the way the Ebola response has been affected by recent U.S. policy decisions. NPR quoted Dr. Craig Spencer, an associate professor of public health at Brown University and an emergency medicine physician with Brown’s Pandemic Center, who told NPR’s A Martínez that the Trump administration’s firing of staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the cutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization are having an impact on the response in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In response to that framing, NPR said the State Department issued a statement saying it was “false to claim that the USAID reform has negatively impacted our ability to respond to Ebola,” adding that funding and support to combat Ebola would continue.
NPR placed the current outbreaks within a longer history of pandemics and epidemics, saying infectious diseases have been part of American and global life for centuries. It noted that flu pandemics in the 20th century dominated the years of 1918, 1957 and 1968, and that in this century notable outbreaks have included SARS, H1N1, Zika, mpox and measles. Adalja told NPR that “Not everything has the ability to be this disruptive force the way COVID was,” and described how science and medicine can make outbreaks less impactful while also enabling earlier, more proactive responses.
Rivers said that, in her experience, a major outbreak that draws international attention happens about every two years. She told NPR, “They’re a lot more frequent than I think many people appreciate,” reflecting a view that the world is periodically confronted by new pathogens even if not all of them spread in the same way or on the same scale.
When hearing about new diseases, experts told NPR that Americans should ask more targeted questions and rely on official guidance. Adalja said people should ask, “Are people talking about this spreading the same way COVID does?” Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease physician and a faculty member at Stanford University, said people should think about personal risk—“Are [experts] talking about my individual risk, like me leaving my house and going to work and coming home?” He advised people to be wary of social media if it is not coming from official press sources because NPR reported that disinformation is being spread deliberately.
For Harvey, the COVID era changed routines in ways that carried forward even as the public encounters new health threats. NPR reported that she calls herself the “hand-washing police,” carries hand sanitizer and makes her son wash his hands, saying, “A lot of those things became routines for us.”