I wrote in 2014 Fortune (see Ebola: The Dark Side of Globalization) that globalization is intellectually obvious but not emotionally digested. People knew that viruses could cross borders. They still felt protected from a distance.
During COVIDI spent several years writing about it consequence of the pandemic and health technology. One lesson stuck with me: Disease doesn’t just happen in bodies. It moves through institutions, devices, dashboards, memories and trust. When people can no longer tell whether the system around them can help them cope, the health threat becomes psychological.
Psychologist Richard Lazarus called it cognitive assessment: the process by which we assess what a situation means and whether we can handle it. First comes the question, often wordless: Is it dangerous for me? Then comes the second: What can I do? If you have any energy, you can also ask, Why did it happen?
About the last, there can be many answers. The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is responsible, however widely classified as a failed state. Rapidly growing population, land grabs for rich mineral resources by elites, decades of armed conflict, internal mass displacementOutbreaks of disease and deep poverty took their toll. The March 23 Movement, a heavily armed rebel group backed by Rwanda, which is accused of widespread war crimes, controls parts of its territory. Rwanda, after all, sees the M23 rebels as an important buffer to protect its territory from violence and discrimination by the local police. They memory is a reference to the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi.
The GuardianUS Health Contributor Melody Schreiber wrote a piece today claiming that the United States “just choosing not to stop” the Ebola outbreak followed massive USAID public health cuts to the fragile health systems of Congo and Uganda. The European Union, another potential culprit, still invests heavily in African health, but has yet to plug it. The US health care funding shortfall.
When a new peak arrives, we won’t be answering these questions from scratch. We answer them through the last template. Mixed in with that are other memories of the past, as well as selective amnesia of things that are too hard to remember. Collective memories are specific to society.
Research in Nature (2023) found that humans memories of the covid pandemic are shaped by their present personality and beliefs, not just based on what happened. Vaccinated individuals remembered more of their previous risk perception; unvaccinated individuals strongly identified with this choice remember it as inferior. Both groups felt confident. Both partially reconstructed the past from the perspective of the present.
The risk is not that this will reshape the way we remember COVID. The danger is that it will reshape how we evaluate everything that comes after it.
Current issue
In mid-May, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in Congo and Uganda a public health emergency of international concern. Previous official reports have listed hundreds of suspected cases and dozens of deaths, and the numbers are expected to change as surveillance improves. Unlike Ebola, which is caused by the Zaire ebolavirus, the WHO currently says that the disease is caused by the Bundibugyo virus. no specific virus vaccine or approved treatmentalthough early supportive care may improve survival.
The facts may be medically clear. They may not feel clear.
As of May 18, 2026, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the risk of spreading to the United States is low. Ebola is not airborne; it is spread by direct contact with bodily fluids of a sick or deceased person or with contaminated objects. Maybe that’s true. It can also feel irrelevant if you say whether the institutions know what is happening to you or not.
The CDC itself acknowledged this in a May 18 statement: “We know people remember the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak.” It’s a rare health sentence that directly names a mental health problem: People don’t hear this boom in a vacuum.
Ring breaking
Here’s what you can do.
Cognitive assessment is not a thought that occurs to you. This is a sentence that you can notice and correct. When you encounter threat information, stop and ask three questions in turn.
- First: What am I actually evaluating? Am I evaluating this new release or am I working on a memory template from 2014 or 2020 or from a different context? The virus is new. you fear not be
- Second: What is my next step? If your answer is “nothing” or “everything,” you’re still in the old mold. A reasonable answer would be: I can follow the travel guide. I can control symptoms if I live or travel to affected areas. I can read primary sources instead of headlines designed to push outdated narratives. The active position can decide: I can donate to public health efforts in Congoor I support the CDC’s efforts.
- Third: Who do I trust and why? Not as a political question, but as a practical question. If you can’t tell if the source is right with you, you’re left with the worst kind of fear: The risk is noticed, but you haven’t determined the next step. Over there to be in a panic lives
The virus spreads through direct contact. Fear spreads through memory. in fact, fear can spread and prevent disease transmission regardless of the actual pathogen. Finding the difference is where the assessment begins. But the assessment itself depends on something that is harder to observe: whether the institutions around you are telling you the truth, whether they know what is going on, and whether they are available to help. In places where these systems have been destroyed—by decades of conflict, an extractive economy, or political abandonment—even a clear perception of threat cannot translate into effective action. The psychology is clear. There are no systems.
