Helen Branswell on the hantavirus: 'A press conference would be nice.'

On April 1, the MV Hondius, a Dutch cruise ship, departed the picturesque docks of Ushuaia, Argentina, bound on a luxurious expedition to the South Atlantic and Antarctica with a hundred and forty-seven passengers aboard. Less than a week into the journey, a seventy-year-old Dutch ornithologist named Leo Schilperoord fell ill with severe respiratory symptoms. Schilperoord’s death, on April 11 on board the ship, was initially attributed to natural causes. When the ship docked in Saint Helena, a British territory, to remove his body, twenty-eight others left the cruise, including Schilperoord’s widow, who flew to South Africa, but died before she could return to the Netherlands. As the Hondius departed, more people fell ill, and a German woman died on board on May 2. 

The culprit, it turned out, was hantavirus, a pathogen that typically spreads through rodent waste, and specifically its Andes variant, the only known hantavirus capable of spreading between humans in cases of prolonged exposure—for which a cruise ship was the perfect venue. Although hantaviruses differ in key ways from coronaviruses, they have high fatality rates for humans, and people across the world immediately began to envision another pandemic, especially as the number of confirmed cases among passengers on the Hondius grew. By Monday, all passengers had disembarked and begun returning to their home countries, including the United States.

The massive public demand for fast, comprehensive information about an obscure virus created a problem and an opportunity for science journalists, as Helen Branswell, the infectious-diseases correspondent for Stat News, told me. Branswell, who has covered SARS, bird flu, H1N1, and Ebola, among other diseases, said the COVID-19 pandemic left journalists in a better position to keep the public calm and well-informed. But the Trump administration’s gutting of federal agencies, and reporters’ lack of access to public health officials and reliable information, pose new challenges. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

ILN: This is a conversation about the media coverage of hantavirus, but let’s get one thing out of the way first: Is this January 2020 all over again?

HB: It’s not January 2020, in any way, shape, or form. It’s a significant event that is likely going to teach the world some things about hantaviruses. But in terms of the broad public health implications around the world, it’s insignificant unless you were on that ship.

COVID-19 had some traits that made it very adept at spreading. People were infectious before they started to develop symptoms, so telling them to isolate themselves once they became sick was not a way to contain it. In 2018 and 2019, there was a hantavirus outbreak in an Argentinian village called Epuyén, and they only recorded four generations of spread, which is relatively low. If COVID had gotten into a community without strict control measures, it wouldn’t have stopped there.

What have been the highlights and lowlights of the hantavirus coverage so far?

The coverage has been overwhelming. That is no one journalist’s fault, and it’s not something that we can control; when everybody pays as much attention to something as they did to this cruise ship last week, it conveys a message that you, as a journalist, may not be intending to convey. It’s true with any weird outbreak that when people see wall-to-wall coverage, they reasonably assume that this is a very severe and serious event. And as with any serious event, it requires careful handling. But it’s not putting somebody in upstate New York or Hoboken, New Jersey, in danger.

I think some of the original early coverage didn’t do a good enough job explaining that this is not the same as measles, influenza, or COVID; this is not something that you would expect to keep spreading. As the week progressed, the coverage improved with this context that initially wasn’t there.

What is the toughest challenge for public health reporters in covering any new infectious disease?

Finding experts who actually know about hantavirus is a challenge. My inbox for days has been inundated with emails from PR firms offering me opportunities to speak to their “experts,” but if I looked them up in PubMed, they’ve never published about hantavirus. Sometimes they weren’t even infectious-disease specialists.

Is that a common mistake—journalists interviewing the wrong experts?

I wouldn’t want to generalize. Some journalists may do it; others are pickier. If you’re trying to put together a story on deadline and you’re having a hard time finding somebody who knows about the topic, I could understand going, “I know this person who is getting quoted a lot—they might be good on this, too.” But when I’m reporting now, I want to talk to people who have actually investigated hantavirus outbreaks.

What is something that you think public health journalism has gotten better at since the COVID-19 pandemic began?

I think the baseline knowledge has risen. There are many reporters who hadn’t written stories about health or science before the pandemic and now understand terms like “incubation period” and “modes of transmission.” Of course, now there is the risk that because you learned something about one pathogen, you might assume it’s true about another pathogen. But they all have their own personalities, and you cannot make those assumptions.

People are still traumatized by pandemic lockdowns, and skepticism toward vaccines and health officials is very high. If another COVID-like pandemic were to begin today, how do you think journalists should communicate about it to have an impact?

I think this current event has shown us that if people get scared, they’ll pay attention. I’m not suggesting that journalists were trying to scare people, but the coverage of this event broke through for a lot of people. I could imagine that some people would dismiss it and say, “Oh, there you go again.” But if there is an outbreak and it’s starting to look like it’s going to cause widespread disease, people will pay attention, and it will be important for journalists to try to put it into context.

How do we avoid alarmism?

At the beginning of an outbreak, you don’t know for sure if it’s going to be a big moment. In January 2020, when I started writing about what was happening in China, I didn’t know that it was going to trigger a pandemic. I just knew that it had that potential and needed to be watched—but threading that needle is very challenging.

I wrote a piece last week trying to contextualize the cruise ship story as serious but not the start of a pandemic, and somebody criticized me on social media because they felt like I downplayed the significance of it. It quickly became apparent that they had read the headline and maybe the first paragraph, but never got to the third paragraph, where I made it very clear that it was still a serious event that needed to be handled appropriately. That’s a problem for our industry: people don’t read until paragraph three, but you also can’t put everything in the headline and the lede.

Since COVID-19, the US government has gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and pulled out of the World Health Organization. How can the press learn what the country is doing about this outbreak, or about disease preparedness in general?

It’s not just that. It’s that communication from them is almost nonexistent. The CDC posted its first notice about the cruise ship situation last Wednesday at about 9:30pm, and they didn’t even push it out to their press list. They just posted a very short statement on their website. In previous times, the CDC would have issued health alert notices about this to inform public health departments and physicians around the country to be on the lookout for cases.

I wanted to speak to somebody at CDC last week about the situation, and I asked by name for an individual who I knew would be good on the topic. But if you reach out to the CDC under this administration, they will ask you to fill in an online form, which goes to HHS. So the HHS communications office got back to me and said that I would have to talk to the State Department about hantavirus. I was like, “Okay, I can understand that the State Department is in charge of repatriating the Americans on board the ship, but the expertise about hantaviruses sits at the CDC.” They never responded to my repeated requests for an interview, and the State Department only gave me some pro forma comments about the health of Americans being the number one priority.

In an ideal world, what sort of access should a public health reporter have to these agencies?

In the middle of an emergency, even if it’s not the start of a pandemic, a press conference would be nice. In previous times, when something like this would happen, the CDC would hold a press conference, and people could dial in and ask questions from designated experts. That was super helpful.

What should reporters focus on in the coming weeks regarding hantavirus?

If no one else from the ship falls sick, the story will probably die away relatively quickly. But the very long incubation period of this virus means that it’s not going to be clear for weeks whether or not there are additional cases.We will see some more possible cases, like the report of a flight attendant who had been on a flight with the second case and felt unwell, but eventually tested negative. They’re going to hit the radar and people will get nervous again. It is possible that this outbreak is going to be a little bigger than it is now, so the challenge is going to be knowing when it’s time to write about something or wait until you hear more. It’s an evolving situation, and the decisions about when it’s worth covering will evolve with it.