Most obvious point: Public health experts need to tell people of course this feels like COVID redux, even to them, before explaining why it isn’t. Mention a few ways it echoes COVID, and agree that people are wise to be a bit skeptical about official “nothing to worry about ” messaging. Earn the right to explain why you don’t think this hantavirus outbreak is the next pandemic, why you’re not advising your loved ones to stock up on toilet paper, masks, and canned goods.
Second obvious point: Every reassuring message should have a verbal asterisk: “We don’t know as much about hantaviruses as we wish we did. It’s always possible – not likely, but possible – that this is a new mutation that could surprise us all. We don’t think so, but after COVID we’re not taking anything for granted. We’re thinking about worst case scenarios, checking and double-checking to make sure we still think this is a big deal only if you were on that ship or came into close contact with someone who was.”
…FWIW, I just sent the following email to a friend. Feel free to use it if it’s useful to you. (You can identify me as a octogenarian risk communication expert who came out of retirement for COVID and has no plans to come out of retirement for hantavirus.)
Re hantavirus, the following is foremost among the many risk communication lessons I ’d be trying to impart if I were still in the game (I’m not, and at 81 I don’t want to be): Validate that people are rightly and naturally reacting to hantavirus as if it could be COVID redux. It is sending so many signals reminiscent of COVID – people dying from a virus they never heard of; experts claiming it’s nothing they should worry about; even a plague-infested cruise ship that no port wants to let land. Earn the right to explain why you think it’s not COVID redux by validating that the hypothesis that it might be is natural and wise.
And don’t overstate your confidence that it’s not a serious public health threat. There’s a lot experts don't know yet about hantaviruses in general or this strain in particular, and among the things you don’t know is how often a “superspreader” materializes who can infect others through casual contact, perhaps even while still asymptomatic. It’s precisely because experts underreacted to COVID at the start that you are overreacting to this tiny hantavirus outbreak, doing everything you can to keep it tiny – which explains the double messages you’re sending, issuing statements that there’s nothing to worry about while dispatching moonsuited experts to meet the ship and fly apparently healthy passengers to a special quarantine hospital in Nebraska. Keep taking more precautions than you think you need, and tell people you’re taking more precautions than you think you need – almost certainly overreacting this time because you might be wrong again and you don’t want to underreact again.
Some of this is off-the-shelf risk communication advice – things like “don’t overreassure” that I’ve been telling clients for decades. But some of it is specific to our post-COVID reality. In the face of low public trust in public health experts, post-COVID credibility depends less on projecting confidence than on acknowledging uncertainty.
Copyright © 2026 by Peter M. Sandman
