The HMPV cascade
I sense the public panic over the HMPV outbreak in China is finally dying down. I don’t know which TV news channel picked up on it first and blew it out of proportion but it created the sort of time in which basic public health literacy would have made a big difference. Clearly such literacy is still quite low in the country.
I also don’t know why it became such a panic at all. As an editorial in The Hindu noted, the outbreak was a problem only insofar as the Indian media made it out to be: it didn’t hit the headlines anywhere else (except perhaps some Sinophobic outlets in the US). It made me wonder what exactly we learnt from COVID-19: wear masks, wash hands, maintain social distancing, and consult your physician, yes, but seemingly not that the COVID-19 pandemic was troublesome because SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus. This novelty made a world of difference.
The whole thing was constantly reminiscent of a 2014 Tamil film called Vaayai Moodi Paesavum (‘Speak With Your Mouth Shut’). In the film, there’s an outbreak of a previously unknown virus and medical researchers are slowly elucidating the full range of its symptoms. But even before they’ve learnt anything about whether it’s deadly or requires drastic action to protect against, the state health minister (played by the well-cast Pandiarajan) — desperate to quell the media outcry and to pacify a worried local populace — declares the state government will manufacture masks en masse and hand them out for free. Good call, right?
The fellow’s unscrupulous: he means to have a relative receive the government contract and take a slice. But his statement feeds the real panic: while until then neither the people nor the journalists knew whether the infection was communicable, his implication that masks are necessary suggests it does, and they’re all in a tizzy.
It was the same way with covering HMPV stories as journalists: all the experts to whom journalists spoke, irrespective of their location in the public or private sectors or their ideological tendencies, said HMPV wasn’t cause for concern. At the same time, local and hyperlocal media outlets were reporting “First HMPV case reported from X city” or “X number of people dead due to HMPV”. Those publications that did have a functional science/health journalism department would’ve been caught in between: they couldn’t deny HMPV’s existence nor leave it out of the front pages, so they had to acknowledge its existence in a way that didn’t also inflate the hype balloon.
Another problem we came across showed up the piecemeal nature of India’s pathogen surveillance programme. Many headlines simply said “X agency detects Y HMPV cases”. Since HMPV has been around for a long time, and hasn’t exactly been hiding, it was a truism that if we went looking for it, we’d find it. And the ICMR did, repeatedly, but when it put out press releases to that effect together with statements asking for the people at large to not worry, just the fact that the agency had picked up on those cases further fuelled concerns.
Public outcry is a dangerous animal. It forced the government’s hand and, in a bid to be seen to be acting, the government instituted the same sort of response measures it would have if there had been an outbreak with real cause for concern. Whatever blew the HMPV outbreak out of proportion, a cascading lack of tact — if not courage — was part of it.
