Note: I’m a journalist, not a doctor, therapist, or medical professional. Nothing in this piece should be taken as medical advice. Any health decisions, including travel decisions related to your health, should be made in consultation with your doctor.
I’m writing this from a small boat somewhere along the Turkish coast, with a glass of local wine in my hand, the shoreline glowing gold in that late-afternoon Aegean way, and somewhere on this intimate wooden vessel. This passenger arrived at dinner two nights ago with a rash on her arms.
A rash. On a boat. In Turkey. While hantavirus headlines are taking over everyone’s phones.
Five years ago, that combination of words would have been enough to send me into a full internal evacuation drill. I would have imagined isolation protocols before dessert, pictured myself calling a doctor from a dock, and refreshed the news until I had convinced myself that the boat I was on was somehow connected to a crisis taking place on an entirely different vessel, in an entirely different part of the world.
But here I am: calm, slightly sunburned, and genuinely still enjoying my trip.
That is not because I think viruses are fake, or travel is risk-free, or anyone should ignore a symptom that worries them. It is because the pandemic made many of us so fluent in fear that we sometimes forget to ask the most important question: what is actually happening here?
The news found me at sea
I did not make a brave, defiant decision to travel despite an outbreak. The outbreak found me already on the water, already several days into a trip I had not planned around any headlines at all.
My phone lit up while I was sitting on deck, watching the Turkish coast drift by. Hantavirus. Cruise ship. Deaths. The WHO is involved—possible human-to-human transmission. The words arrived with that awful, familiar force, the kind that sends your stomach somewhere below your knees before you have even finished reading the first paragraph.
The ship in the news was the MV Hondius, not my small Turkish gulet, and the outbreak had been reported on a Dutch-flagged cruise ship that had departed from Ushuaia, Argentina, and traveled through remote regions of the South Atlantic. According to the WHO, the cluster involved severe respiratory illness among passengers and crew, with multiple deaths and investigations ongoing.
That is serious. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
But the details matter enormously, especially when every headline seems designed to drag us straight back to 2020. The strain involved has been identified as Andes virus, a type of hantavirus associated with South America. Hantavirus infection is usually linked to exposure to infected rodents or their urine, droppings, or saliva. Human-to-human transmission is unusual, though limited transmission has been reported in past outbreaks, typically involving close, prolonged contact.
That phrase—close and prolonged contact—is the part I kept coming back to.
Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News, told NPR that when human-to-human transmission has been seen with the Andes virus, it has involved very close, prolonged contact, such as between a husband and wife. She also said this is not like COVID or flu exposure, where simply being in the same room with someone is the main concern.
I am on a small gulet in Turkey with people I have had dinner with twice. That is not the kind of prolonged, intimate contact that experts describe. It is also not a reason to pretend the news does not matter. It is simply a reason not to let the news become a horror movie in my head.
And that distinction feels important.
This is not a giant cruise ship with thousands of passengers, a buffet the size of a football field, and people disappearing into elevators for days at a time. It is a traditional Turkish wooden boat, with a handful of guests, a small crew, and a rhythm that has more to do with swimming off the back, eating long dinners, and watching the coastline change slowly than with anything resembling mass tourism.
Oddly, this is the kind of closeness that would have terrified the post-pandemic version of me. Instead, it has become exactly what I needed: not escape from reality, but a reminder that reality is not always as frightening as the internet makes it feel.
A rash is not always a crisis
Then came the rash.
A woman on board arrived at dinner with red marks on her arms, and I felt the room notice before anyone said anything. A few glances. A half-second pause in conversation. Someone who had been laughing became very interested in their plate.
Nobody was rude. Nobody said the thing out loud. But you could feel the fear flicker through the room because we all know the script now. A symptom appears. A headline is already circulating. A boat becomes a setting. Suddenly, your brain starts assembling a catastrophe with the speed and confidence of a cable-news producer.
I understood it because I have been that person. I have read too much into a cough. I have measured a child’s forehead with my hand, then with my lips, then with a thermometer, and then, somehow, Google. I have sat on planes wondering whether the person across the aisle was sick or simply tired. I have lived in the same post-pandemic atmosphere as everyone else, where every sniffle can feel like a test of how much anxiety your nervous system can still hold.
But here is what actually happened.
When we docked, she went to see a doctor onshore, which is exactly what a responsible person should do when something seems off. She did not panic or ignore it. She got it checked.
The diagnosis had nothing to do with the virus in the headlines. It was an unrelated, non-contagious skin condition. Treatable. Mundane. The kind of thing that happens to people on trips all the time because bodies do not stop being weird just because the news cycle has chosen a new subject.
By evening, she was back on the top deck, laughing, watching the sunset, and holding a cold Efes like any other person trying to enjoy a vacation.
I keep thinking about that because it feels like the whole story in miniature. Even during COVID, people still got rashes. They still got stomach bugs, sinus infections, mystery aches, sun reactions, mosquito bites, and allergic responses that had absolutely nothing to do with the virus everyone was afraid of. But the pandemic trained us to collapse every symptom into one dominant fear.
Every cough was COVID. Every fever was COVID. And now, apparently, every rash can become whatever outbreak is currently trending.
That is no way to move through the world.
We are still carrying the pandemic around with us
Here is the part nobody really wants to admit: many of us are still not fine.
The COVID-19 pandemic did something to the collective nervous system that cannot be undone by reopening restaurants, dropping mask mandates, or pretending we are all back to normal because airport terminals are crowded again. We spent years being told that ordinary life could kill us or someone we loved. We learned to scan rooms, read bodies, distrust surfaces, and treat proximity as a possible threat.
For some people, that vigilance was necessary. For others, it became its own kind of cage.
I do not think we talk honestly enough about what it means to travel after that. Not the logistics of it—the testing, vaccines, entry forms, masks, or travel insurance policies—but the emotional hangover. The way a headline can still pull a lever inside you. The way your body can react to a health story before your brain has had time to interpret it.
That is what I felt when I saw the news about hantavirus at sea—not a reasoned concern at first. Muscle memory.
The difference now is that I know to pause before letting fear take over the itinerary.
I am not being reckless. I am being deliberate.
There is a strange thing that happens when you say you are not panicking: people assume you are being careless.
I am not. I wash my hands. I pay attention to my body. I follow credible public-health guidance. I believe doctors, epidemiologists, and outbreak investigators know much more about infectious diseases than I do.
I also believe that fear is not the same thing as wisdom.
The WHO has advised passengers and crew involved in the outbreak to practice hand hygiene, monitor symptoms, isolate if symptomatic, and follow public health guidance. That is very different from saying that every traveler on every boat in every country should immediately spiral because a rare outbreak is being investigated elsewhere.
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control also described the risk to the general population in Europe as very low, noting that hantaviruses are not easily transmitted between people and that Andes virus transmission is typically linked to close, prolonged contact.
That nuance matters. It is the difference between taking something seriously and letting it take over your life.
Because the truth is, we’ve already lost so much time. I know people who still haven’t been on a plane since 2019. People who keep waiting for the world to feel fully safe before they reenter it. People who have canceled trips not because of a direct risk, but because the background noise of dread became too loud.
I do not judge them. I have been very close to becoming one of them.
Somewhere between lockdowns, variants, travel restrictions, and the endless cycle of alarm and relief and alarm again, I had to ask myself a question I did not particularly want to answer: was I going to let fear become the organizing principle of my life?
Or was I going to accept that risk is part of being alive and still see the world?
This week, I chose Turkey.
The world did not stop because I was scared
Life on this boat continued exactly as it was meant to.
We swam off the back in water, so blue it looked like it had been dyed. We anchored in quiet coves. We ate dinners at a shared table, passing plates and learning the names of people we might never see again but will probably remember longer than expected. The Turkish coast did not pause because of a frightening headline on my phone.
The fishermen were still out before dawn. The crew still moved around the deck with that quiet competence that makes boat life feel both ancient and deeply practical. The ruins and rocky hillsides still slid past us, indifferent to whatever the internet had decided we should be afraid of that day.
That is not to say the world is safe. It never has been. It is to say that the world is still happening.
And there is a difference.
I am not telling you to ignore your limits
I am not saying everyone should travel right now. I am not saying fear is irrational. I am not saying anyone who is immunocompromised, caring for someone vulnerable, or simply not comfortable should push past their own boundaries because a woman on a boat in Turkey wrote an opinion piece.
Context matters. Health matters. Individual circumstances matter.
What I am saying is this: if the only thing stopping you is the ambient dread that has become the background noise of post-pandemic life, it may be worth looking at that dread directly and not dismissing it and not mocking it and just asking whether it is protecting you from a real risk, or whether it is simply replaying an old emergency.
Because there are still strangers worth meeting on small boats, there are still sunsets worth watching from a deck. There are still coastlines that have outlasted every panic in human history and will outlast this one, too.
And there is, at least on my boat, a woman with a perfectly ordinary skin condition who is already planning which cove she wants to swim in tomorrow.
Life is still happening.
I think we should still be in it.
