Hantavirus had the audacity to include my country in its travels. We’d really love not to be in the headlines in relation to something so unsettling.
The international cruise ship MV Hondius was making its way past Mzansi – it’s what we call South Africa – from southern Argentina to the Canary Islands via Cape Verde when passengers got sick. It was soon discovered to be hantavirus, which is rare and transmitted by rodents.
Unfortunately, what can start as a headache and fever can turn deadly, as it did in this case. One passenger died en route to St Helena Island, where his remains are now awaiting repatriation to the Netherlands. His wife attempted to fly home, but collapsed at Johannesburg airport and later died. One other traveller has also since died.
Currently, there is one British patient from the cruise ship who is in critical hospital care in South Africa with a confirmed case of hantavirus. The World Health Organization has intervened quickly and has said that the public health risk is low.
Although I’m frequently impressed with the WHO and am sure that is true, I won’t fault anyone for being a little jumpy about viruses, after having lived through 2020. Indeed, a lot of the social media comments on the hantavirus story have talked about lockdowns and toilet-paper hoarding, though locals specifically would like South Africa’s government not to ban alcohol again, pretty please.
Contact tracing in South Africa has found around 62 people at possible risk so far, though none of them has tested positive for the virus. Unfortunately, the strain that is here is the Andes virus, and it’s the only type of hantavirus that is known to be transmissible between humans. Just our luck, it seems.
The vessel has now offloaded more ill passengers and hopes to continue to the Canary Islands. The general consensus seems to be that this will not turn into a global crisis. The South African government has issued a statement urging us all to be calm, which of course has had the opposite effect.
It must be noted that for such a rare illness, both local and international teams realised and reacted to the situation quite swiftly and well. Experts have even said that it is ideal for some of these patients to have ended up in South Africa, thanks to our strong surveillance systems and long history of handling pulmonary infections.
Despite all this reasonable talk, the general reaction of South Africans was more like that of a child asked to take out the trash again when it was clearly their sibling’s turn. “Come ooon, why always me?” Couldn’t the latest scary virus have picked a country with less of a penchant for ending up on the news?
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Aside from our ongoing tiffs with the US, we have plenty of ridiculous headlines at home. I’m not even talking about serious things that just sound strange, like the recent story about airlifting a crocodile that was found to have eaten a load of flip-flops and which had to be put to sleep.
We excel in headlines that make you want to laugh as you cry, like how our draft state artificial intelligence policy included fake references made up by, you guessed it, AI. And let’s not forget that our president will be in court soon because of large amounts of cash found hidden inside a couch. That’s an oversimplification, but you get the point. South Africans do not want any more ridiculous headlines.
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Others immediately flexed our well-trained conspiracy theory muscles to ask whether we had been designated to receive the passengers as part of some greater plot. Of particular concern is the fact that the woman who later died in Johannesburg appears to have passed through a commercial plane and airport before serious concerns were raised around her medical state.
Of course, this is a serious medical issue that has already affected several countries. South Africa isn’t special, except perhaps in how we complain.
Ultimately, it seems that my country is more like the kid in class who always gets picked on. And so we fall back on our somewhat dark sense of humour, even in chaos. We laugh at the headlines and the craziness of foreign affairs, and hope that with this latest outbreak, things don’t get serious any time soon.
Elna Schütz is a Johannesburg-based freelance journalist working in audio and writing
