Tweets from the Global Times usually collect a handful of retweets and a few dozen likes. The one about a hantavirus death in China pulled in more than 14,500 shares and 17,000 likes, and by Tuesday afternoon more than 400,000 Twitter messages had gone out about the virus.
The state-controlled Chinese outlet posted late Monday, in English, that a person from Yunnan Province had died on a chartered bus heading back to Shandong Province for work. “He tested positive for #hantavirus,” the tweet said. “Other 32 people on bus were tested.” It came with a photo of someone being screened for COVID-19, which did the rest. No story ran on the outlet’s English website.
Social media promptly read it as a “coronavirus 2.0” scare. Specialists in Canada and the United States were not impressed.
“This is hysteria,” Dr. Stephanie Smith, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Alberta, told Global News. “We have seen hantavirus here in Canada and in the U.S. for many years.” Dr. Gerard Evans of Queen’s University added that it “is not transmitted person-to-person like COVID-19.” Neuroscientist Dr. Sumaiya Shaikh offered her own advice on Twitter: “Please do not panic, unless you plan to eat rats.”
What the virus actually does
Under the hood, hantavirus is simple. People catch it from dust contaminated by the saliva, urine or feces of rodents, according to the Ontario Ministry of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is rare and unpleasant. It attacks the heart and kills roughly 36-40 per cent of patients. But it does not pass from person to person, the trait a virus needs to become a pandemic.
Symptoms include fever, muscle aches, headaches, coughing, nausea and vomiting. Some patients become severely ill, and symptoms can take up to six weeks after exposure to appear.
The strain matters. Hantaviruses in the Americas can cause hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which the CDC says kills about 36 per cent of patients; the U.S. logged 728 cases from 1993 to January 2017. In Europe and Asia, hantaviruses can cause hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, which kills one to 15 per cent of patients, the CDC says.
North America has reported the disease since 1993. Canada sees approximately three cases a year and the U.S. about 35, per the Ontario Ministry of Health. Other strains have turned up in Europe and Asia since the 1950s. A spokesperson for the Public Health Agency of Canada told Global News that the risk of infection in Canada and elsewhere is low, and that nearly all forms of the virus do not spread between people.
The World Health Organization watched an outbreak of about 100 cases in Panama in 2018 and found “no significant risk of international spread.”
Panic, with a side of infodemic
The CDC moved quickly on Tuesday to knock down the pandemic fears. The WHO has warned that the coronavirus pandemic is arriving with an “infodemic,” a flood of real and fake reports that can leave anxious readers unsure what to believe. It urges people to follow official health authorities rather than whatever is circulating on social media.
The advice for avoiding hantavirus is mundane: stop rodent infestations and clean thoroughly wherever droppings are found, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
