"Anybody who’s betting on a viral spread, I’m going to…guess that they have an addiction problem when it comes to gambling."
That was my favorite bit of insight from Sophie Hurwitz and Anna Rogers, who looked at the $3 million in hantavirus-related bets on the popular predictions platform, Polymarket. Let's take a stroll:
Over the past four days, bettors on the prediction platform Polymarket have wagered nearly $3 million on whether we’ll see a hantavirus pandemic this year. A cluster of cases of a particularly deadly strain of the virus erupted on a cruise ship last month, killing three people out of eight suspected cases linked to the vessel. Though the news has stoked fears, the World Health Organization currently classifies the risk of a full-blown pandemic as low.
But Polymarket users are spending big across several hantavirus-related propositions—including whether a vaccine will be developed this year and whether or not officials will tie the cruise ship outbreak to a “lab leak.”
The trend, of course, speaks to a public health issue in its own right: gambling. But the United States more or less doesn't seem to care. Which is striking, because it seems like even Donald Trump gets that it might be a problem. "It is what it is."
—Inae Oh
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