New virus, old fears

The long-term consequences of Covid-19, several years after the pandemic was declared over, are still visible in everyday life - in working from home, in the fact that for some wearing masks has become the new normal, as well as in the hand sanitizer dispensers that remain ubiquitous.

But some other consequences are not so obvious. They are the ones we carry inside us - grief for lost loved ones, chronic health conditions, the feeling that our lives have been interrupted. And in recent days, after a rare outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship, another has surfaced: the fear that, despite officials' assurances, it could all happen again.

But the rise of fear, whether on a personal or societal level, can also be an indication that something else is missing. Perhaps there is no more ingrained post-pandemic reality than the damage being done, in the United States and around the world, to bonds that many would have considered strong in pre-pandemic times — trust in science, government, and information itself.

“Covid has undermined our trust in what most of us believed before,” said Elisa Jane Binnenstock, a research professor and sociologist at Arizona State University. “When public trust is down, when there’s a lot of cynicism, who do people turn to to explain to them what to do and how the world works?”

Before 2020, a disease outbreak somewhere in the world usually did not cause much concern outside of the specifically affected areas, even when individual epidemics claimed a significant number of lives.

This was partly a result of being lulled to a world in which mass travel was not as widely accessible as it is today, which was one of the key factors in the spread of Covid-19.

In fact, over the past decades, there have been outbreaks of the current strain of hantavirus in some South American countries, such as the one in Chile in 1997. Other countries have faced outbreaks of a range of diseases, from cholera and dengue to SARS, while the US has seen cases of West Nile virus, Legionnaires' disease, and other infections.

But in a post-Covid world, it wasn’t long before questions and concerns about the spread of the disease emerged in the days immediately following the first reports that three people had died from hantavirus on the ship. Since then, 11 cases of hantavirus linked to the cruise have been reported worldwide, including deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Eight of the cases have been confirmed by laboratory testing.

Health experts have repeatedly stressed that while the virus can cause serious illness in those infected, the risk of it spreading to the general population is low. Still, when the passengers from the ship were transferred to the Spanish island of Tenerife to disembark, residents like Samantha Aguero were concerned.

“We feel a little unsafe. It doesn’t feel like there are 100 percent safety measures in place to welcome them,” she said. “After all, this is a virus, and we’ve already experienced that during the pandemic.”

Binenstock points to three institutions that have suffered the consequences of the loss of public trust: government, the media, and science itself. However, government officials and journalists were facing public distrust long before the pandemic.

Without trust, people rely more on rumors, fear, and emotions, which can lead them to overreact to small risks and underreact to serious ones.

Distrust in science was given an added boost not because scientists were wrong in their actions, but because non-scientists did not have the same understanding of the process, she said.

"Most people don't see science as a process. In their minds, science is the answer, the fact. And so, when it turned out that those facts weren't 100 percent reliable and certain, it started to undermine trust in science," she said.

“One of the problems with Covid is that it has undermined trust in science among people who don’t understand how science works. It has shown the process. And it has shown that scientists don’t always have the answer,” Binnenstock said. “For many people in a crisis, when they are overcome by fear, it doesn’t matter what the answer is, as long as it is definitive. And science can’t provide that when it doesn’t know something.”

It's not just an issue that's currently in the spotlight. There are broader implications.

“Covid has not only increased people’s sensitivity to health threats. It has done so unevenly, in ways that are often unrelated to the actual risk,” said Michelle Gelfand, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s School of Business.

“As trust in institutions has eroded, people have lost one of the key ways to cope with uncertainty together. Without trust, people rely more on rumors, fear, and emotions, which can lead them to overreact to small risks and underreact to serious ones.”

Carlin Morgan, a 76-year-old retired nurse anesthetist from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has noticed this increased attention, as more people without medical or scientific training are now speaking out about health issues than before the pandemic.

She was also troubled by the increase in what she saw as a lack of trust in science, seen in declining vaccination rates and increasing cases of diseases like measles.

“I think people have a lot less confidence, because before they just took their kids to get vaccinated,” she said. “When I was a kid, there was no question about whether you were going to get the shot.”

If trust is to be restored, Gelfand said in an email that leaders must get involved.

“They send a signal about the threat. They determine whether people will receive accurate information about the level of danger or distorted information that serves a political agenda. When leaders send clear and honest signals, people can orient themselves in the face of the threat. When leaders manipulate the threat for their own purposes, norms collapse and trust disappears,” Gelfand said.

"Strong, reliable institutions have historically been our superpower as societies. They are what allow millions of people to coordinate in conditions of uncertainty without knowing each other personally," she said.

"Without that institutional support, we lose the very capacity for collective action that has helped human communities survive for thousands of years."

Translation: A. Š.