Hantavirus Is Nothing Like Coronavirus, but It’s Bringing Some ‘Covid P.T.S.D.’

Medical workers in protective suits. Contact tracing. P.C.R. tests and World Health Organization briefings.

Just when much of the public had presumed to have left those ominous images and turns of phrase intertwined with the Covid-19 pandemic in the rearview mirror, a deadly hantavirus outbreak aboard a Dutch cruise ship has dredged up familiar anxieties.

Health experts, aware of the scars Covid left on people, including those who are still dealing with it, have sought to dispel comparisons between hantavirus and coronavirus. They said this week that the viruses spread quite differently and were not close in magnitude.

Still, those reassurances have not quelled the public’s anxiety or its appetite for medical advice from some of the same doctors who commanded attention on television as Covid-19 marched across the globe.

“I have Covid P.T.S.D.,” Dr. Celine R. Gounder, editor at large for public health at KFF Health News and an infectious disease expert, said in an interview on Thursday. “There are parts of New York City I cannot walk by without seeing the refrigerated mortuary trucks. I had to get rid of certain things I was using during the pandemic, clothing or otherwise, because it was triggering. So I completely get where people are coming from.”

“That said,” Dr. Gounder was swift to emphasize, “not all infectious diseases are created equal.”

In Spain, the president of the Canary Islands lodged a protest against allowing the cruise ship to dock there, while a flurry of threads have begun to appear on social media sites pondering whether it was safe to travel at all.