COVID is shaping Americans' reaction to Ebola and hantavirus

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced people across the U.S. to a global health emergency that they may have never imagined.

That experience is coloring how some people are thinking about Ebola and hantavirus, public health and infectious disease experts say. Fear around exotic-sounding diseases has always existed, but now people know how a pandemic can change their life.

As Chandra Harvey, a content creator on Instagram whose joking video about another possible pandemic received over 100,000 views, told NPR: "We're all dealing with PTSD from COVID."

For Harvey, COVID-19 "heavily impacted" her family, with a few relatives hospitalized. "COVID scarred all of us," she said.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, "you were worried about your friends and neighbors and loved ones dying from COVID," said Dr. Ali S. Khan, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. More than 1 million Americans died of COVID-19.

Despite Ebola currently spreading in parts of eastern Africa, infectious disease experts told NPR that the average American should not be concerned about Ebola or hantavirus becoming a repeat of COVID-19.

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Here's what to know about how Ebola and hantavirus differ from COVID-19, as well as what people should keep in mind when reading alarming headlines or scrolling through social media.

The COVID-19 effect on Americans

There is the "dread factor" with certain diseases, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an infectious disease physician. Even though far more people die from influenza on average every year than from Ebola, "certain diseases spark dread in people," he said.

Harvey, the content creator, said hearing about two diseases back-to-back "jumped out" to her family.

"Ebola … with the combination of hantavirus at the same time, it's just like, it's too much," she said. "Any time you hear of anything from a virus perspective, it's just scary."

Adalja said the memory of COVID-19 also causes Americans to lump outbreaks together.

But the diseases spread differently. COVID-19 (like measles) can spread through the air. Ebola is typically spread through bodily fluids, such as vomit or blood. Hantavirus most often spreads to humans through contact with urine, feces or saliva from infected rodents, though one strain has been identified that can spread from person to person.

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"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," Adalja said.

Some may also be alarmed about how deadly these diseases are and the lack of treatment options, as well as the coincidence that they both gained attention in the same month.

Also, the delay in detecting the Ebola outbreak has made it harder to control the situation, infectious disease specialists told NPR. Dr. Craig Spencer, an associate professor of public health at Brown University and an emergency medicine physician with Brown's Pandemic Center, 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 current response in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In a statement to NPR on Monday, the State Department said 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.

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Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, said she's "very concerned about the Ebola outbreak as an epidemiologist."

However, "I'm not worried as a mom, meaning I'm not expecting Ebola to influence my community or really the United States," said Rivers, who wrote the book Crisis Averted: The Hidden Science of Fighting Outbreaks. Similarly, public health officials say the risk to the general public from hantavirus is very low.

The larger context of pandemics

Pandemics and epidemics have been a part of American and global life for centuries, going back to ancient times.

In the 20th century, flu pandemics dominated the years of 1918, 1957 and 1968. In this century, there have been notable outbreaks of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), the H1N1 flu virus (swine flu), the Zika virus, mpox and measles. Ebola has also had multiple outbreaks in the past few decades, with the one in 2014 killing more than 11,000 people.

Humans have been fighting infectious diseases since they first evolved, Adalja said.

Adalja said he puts the Ebola and hantavirus outbreaks into the larger history of pandemics, epidemics and outbreaks: "Not everything has the ability to be this disruptive force the way COVID was."

"[People] have to understand that pandemics have always been something that humans are going to face," Adalja said. "But science and technology and medicine, they offer us the ability to master these issues, to make them less impactful, to be proactive."

Rivers, the epidemiologist, said that in her experience, a major outbreak of international attention happens about every two years.

"They're a lot more frequent than I think many people appreciate."

What to think about when you hear about a new disease

Instead of immediately turning to dread, experts said, Americans can focus on targeted questions and stay informed with information from local, state and national health officials.

Adalja said to ask: "Are people talking about this spreading the same way COVID does?" Similarly, Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease physician and faculty member at Stanford University, thinks about personal risk: "Are [experts] talking about my individual risk, like me leaving my house and going to work and coming home?"

Adalja also said to "be very wary of what you see on social media if it's not coming from an official press source, because there is a lot of disinformation being deliberately spread."

Harvey, the Instagram influencer, said that since COVID-19, she calls herself the "hand-washing police." She carries hand sanitizer in her purse and constantly makes her son wash his hands. "A lot of those things became routines for us."

Rivers said if people are worried, they can wear a mask and avoid crowded indoor spaces or, if available, vaccinate. "Focusing on those controllables can be helpful," she said.