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The details of the ongoing outbreak of hantavirus may sound uncomfortably familiar to all of us who lived through Covid-19: an aggressive pneumonia-like infection, a cruise ship quarantined with sick passengers, the world’s public health authorities on high alert.

So it’s natural to have the follow-up question: Is this the next pandemic?

Not likely, experts say, for one major reason: Hantavirus is not equipped for rapid transmission in the same way that the novel coronavirus was. “Just because something is a public health emergency doesn’t mean it’s a pandemic,” Amesh Adalja , senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. Bill Hanage , associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, said while it’s vital to stamp out the outbreak, his concerns about a large-scale emergency are “essentially nil.”

But this is still a big deal.…