The months of April and May in England, where I now live, herald spring after a long, dark and wet winter. Back home in India, they signal the onset of summer. Yet, despite the colours of spring, these months revive painful memories of 2021, when Covid brought death and despair to India. Everyone lost someone. I did too.
Five years later, the world is confronting two very different infectious disease outbreaks. Hantavirus infections emerged aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius in early April, with 11 suspected cases and three deaths. Ebola resurfaced in Central Africa and continues to spread. At the time of writing, around a thousand suspected and confirmed infections and more than 200 deaths had been reported.
These outbreaks offer important benchmarks for assessing our preparedness five years after Covid. They must be examined against the core pillars of public health.
Let us first consider early detection, surveillance and public-health infrastructure. This depends on multiple capacities: Trained epidemiologists and field investigators; laboratories and rapid diagnostics; case-reporting and contact-tracing systems; genomic sequencing; syndromic and environmental surveillance; isolation and quarantine capability; infection-prevention and control programmes; and real-time data sharing between authorities. In the case of Ebola, health authorities did relatively well in early detection and surveillance, largely because the world has spent decades preparing for the disease’s recurrence. In contrast, the Hantavirus outbreak exposed surveillance gaps during unusual, low-frequency zoonotic outbreaks in complex international settings such as cruise ships, especially when the pathogen is unexpected, and symptoms initially resemble common respiratory illnesses.
Clinical-response capacity constitutes the second major requirement. This includes hospitals equipped to manage surges of the disease, PPE and medical supply chains, clinicians, and access to therapeutics, oxygen, intensive care and supportive treatment. The two pathogens posed very different challenges. In the case of Ebola, authorities demonstrated a comparatively mature and specialised clinical-response system, largely a result of years of investment and experience. The Hantavirus outbreak revealed strong downstream hospital care but weaker front-end preparedness, particularly in recognising and managing an unexpected pathogen in an unusual setting.
Risk communication and the building of public trust require transparent messaging, clear behavioural guidance, effective countering of misinformation, and engagement with community leaders and local institutions. These mechanisms were stronger in the case of Ebola because global public-health systems have spent years developing communication frameworks around the disease. The Hantavirus outbreak demonstrated how rapidly uncertainty and novelty can destabilise public understanding, particularly in high-profile environments that attract intense media attention. At the same time, misinformation has not been completely absent from the Ebola response, underlining the need for stronger strategies to sustain public trust. Faith leaders are playing an important role in containing the outbreak, much as they did during polio-eradication campaigns. Yet, fear, stigma, mistrust and culturally sensitive practices continue to complicate engagement with the disease.
The Ebola response also illustrates how previous crises can create enduring scientific infrastructure. The Hantavirus outbreak, in contrast, has highlighted the difficulties of rapidly organising research around a relatively rare and less continuously-funded pathogen. Coordination becomes more difficult when the contagion, its transmission setting and the governance structures involved are unfamiliar, particularly where private-sector actors play major operational roles.
However, even the experience of dealing with Ebola has not eliminated persistent challenges. Despite more mature global logistics, supply-chain systems, field operations and emergency-deployment mechanisms, reports continue to emerge of shortages of PPE and disinfection materials. The Hantavirus outbreak, meanwhile, exposed vulnerabilities associated with international travel environments, particularly maritime settings involving multinational passengers and private-sector operators.
Managing public-health emergencies requires political leadership and governance systems capable of enabling rapid decision-making, establishing legal frameworks for emergency response, ensuring stable funding and coordinating across jurisdictions. The Hantavirus outbreak exposed governance challenges associated with multinational travel systems and dependence on private-sector operators, where authority and accountability were more fragmented. Ebola governance systems, while more developed, continue to face political tensions and resource constraints.
The Hantavirus outbreak has also revealed how many zoonotic pathogens still lack deeply developed preparedness ecosystems, particularly for unusual scenarios. The outbreak was managed largely through broader infectious-disease capacity rather than through dedicated long-term systems.
Containing a disease outbreak requires a systemic approach. Success depends less on any single intervention than on how rapidly surveillance, science, healthcare delivery, governance and public communication can function together. Covid triggered a surge in global health funding, much of it emergency-driven and insufficiently institutionalised. Since 2024–25, however, this support has declined sharply, driven in large part by cuts in US aid. This has been compounded by the weakening of global institutions such as the WHO.
One important structural reality of global preparedness is that it remains strongest against crises the world has repeatedly confronted — Ebola, for instance — and weakest against novel or operationally unusual events such as the Hantavirus outbreak. Over time, preparedness has become deeper. It must now become broader as well. Yet developments since 2025 do not inspire confidence about the future of pandemic preparedness.
Since Covid, awareness of pandemic risk has increased. Yet political willingness to finance preparedness has weakened. The world is scientifically more capable than it was before the pandemic, but financially and politically less stable in sustaining preparedness systems. Unless this structural weakness is addressed, the next outbreak involving an unusual pathogen could unfold very differently from what happened aboard the MV Hondius.
The writer is a virologist and chair of Ignite Life Science Foundation (India)
Global preparedness remains strongest against crises the world has repeatedly confronted — Ebola — and weakest against novel events such as the Hantavirus 
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