The outbreak of hantavirus on a Dutch cruise ship in the South Atlantic has stirred up painful suppressed memories of the Covid-19 pandemic. The dominant response on social media has been “oh no, not again” or “I’m not joining in this time”, along with dismay at seeing virologists on news bulletins and talk shows again. Scientists have done their best to reassure the public that the risk of the virus spreading through the general public is extremely low, but one lesson we should have learned from Covid is that people’s anxieties cannot be massaged away with statistics. On Polymarket on Friday morning, a hantavirus pandemic was trading at a steady 10% chance.
By chance, the first week of May is also the time when the Netherlands commemorates its war dead. A solemn ceremony is held in Amsterdam to remember those who fell on the battlefield, perished in the death camps and were executed by the Nazis’ firing squads. The entire country falls silent for two minutes. War veterans, now more than 100 years old, are brought out to tell us not to forget their comrades’ sacrifice – a word chosen to remind the living that our freedom is a privilege paid for with their lives. The debate rages about who should be included in or excluded from the ceremonies, but nearly everyone agrees that we should honour and commemorate those who died.
David Tollerton, a professor of memory studies at Exeter University, described in a recent article for The Conversation how he dug out a memorial stone to the victims of the Covid-19 pandemic in his home city that had become overgrown with grass and leaves after just three years. Prime ministers line up to pay their respects at the Cenotaph each year, but on the one occasion that Boris Johnson, who was in charge of the country during the pandemic and directed the lockdowns, visited the Covid Memorial Wall in London it was under cover of darkness.
We have a culture of remembrance and a culture of forgetting. Neither are straightforward processes.
Tollerton writes that one of the problems with memorialising Covid-19 is that it lacks a heroic narrative, or a sense of triumph over an ideological enemy that validates people’s memories of hardship. Given time, they may even become nostalgic for it, as many people whose grandparents lived through the Blitz will testify. Nobody feels nostalgia for the days when they had to wear face masks or forgo international travel and dinners with friends to contain a disease that, for most of us who survived, felt like a debilitating flu. There was barely a murmur when the Dutch government recently cut the budget for support for Long Covid patients by 80%. The 35,000 people suffering from the most debilitating effects of the virus, some of whom have not left their bedrooms in years, are being quietly erased from the collective memory. One can only imagine the outcry if war veterans were treated in the same way.
We have a culture of remembrance, and a culture of forgetting. Neither are straightforward or accidental processes. They require effort, commitment and maintenance. It is a deliberate choice to commemorate the victims of war, just as it is a deliberate choice to forget the victims of a disease that killed at least seven million people in just over six years and still isn’t finished. These are irrational processes, driven by emotional needs and fears, but they shape our political decisions. There is no objective reason why Western governments should see an invasion by a hostile foreign power as a more immediate or substantial threat than another pandemic, especially given that only one of these events has happened in the last decade. Yet last year the members of Nato were browbeaten by Donald Trump into ramping up their defence spending to 3.5% of GDP. How did governments find this money? In the case of the Netherlands, it was by cutting back on the healthcare budget.
The instinct to forget is understandable, perhaps inevitable. Less forgivable is the political choice to exploit and aggravate it. The hantavirus outbreak has revived anger towards governments and a sense that a postdiluvian promise that lockdowns will never happen again has been broken. Virologists have been caught in an awkward bind, needing to reassure the public that the virus is not the next pandemic while hoping that it will serve as a reminder that it is only a matter of time before another virus jumps the species barrier and triggers a mass Covid-like infection. The second part of that message risks being forgotten because of the overbearing need to dispel people’s fear and anger on the first point.
War and pestilence have caught humans by surprise throughout history, partly because of this cycle of remembrance and forgetting. Even the commemorations of the Second World War have shifted in tone over the last 80 years from demanding enduring peace to fetishising conflict. At the Dutch Remembrance Day ceremony, protesters who wanted to silently hold up banners with the slogan “never again is now” were escorted away by the police. We want to be reassured that these terrible events will never happen again, but we don’t want to be burdened with the pain. And politicians, part of whose job is to manage that burden, all too often find it more convenient to forget.
