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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

This is of course very bad for the people involved, but is there any indication that the matter deserves the amount of public attention that it has?

My understanding is, unfortunate souls got infected with nasty disease that hardly crosses between humans, end of story. Am I missing something?

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Generally the best time to deal with potential mass infections is before they become uncontrollable. If you act properly and stop a disaster before it becomes one, the situation will be indistinguishable from an overreaction.

Because absent more evidence we don't yet know if this is a different variant of the Andes virus than the one people have had experience with. A lot hinges on whether this flight attendant is hospitalized out of an abundance of caution, or something entirely unrelated. But given that they came into relatively brief contact with an infected person, it would be significant if somehow she contracted it. A lot of people disembarked and went to various parts of the world. Combined with a long incubation period, that's a lot of guessing.

So far, the flight attendant has tested negative. This of course doesn't mean she hasn't contracted it - hantavirus has a long incubation period after all - but as of right now, whatever symptoms she is experiencing are not due to hantavirus.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

There are reasons why this outbreak is slightly more newsworthy than others.

It happened to rich Westerners, not a bunch of poor people from Africa.

It happened on an international flight and a cruise ship. There is a lot of exposure. There are people being monitored for hantavirus being sent back to their respective countries.

People are having flashbacks of 2019/2020 and comparing the news coming out about this outbreak.

The political season is in full swing in the US and there is lots of finger pointing, especially around the health departments.

You're missing the imperative to keep the populace depressed, apathetic and scared to death.

Most of the public messaging I see is basically "please don't stop shopping, flying, or going to restaurants."

No need to spin this down into consumerism.

The messaging is "please keep on living your lives despite all the psychological terror you've been subject to by the power/money that be that don't even attempt to cover its fascist face anymore".

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