There are now more than 1,000 confirmed cases of monkeypox in New York City, which continues to be a hotspot for the virus, health officials said on Monday.
New York reached 1,040 cases as of Monday, said the most recent information released by the city. That accounts for about a quarter of all of the confirmed cases in the US.
The US leads the world in confirmed cases, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). As of Monday, there were 3,846 confirmed cases in the US and 18,095 globally, the CDC said. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a public health emergency on Saturday.
The virus is spreading primarily among men who have sex with men, research has shown. Close sexual contact was responsible for transmission in 95% of cases, one recent study found.
There is a divide in New York City’s health department over whether the agency should advise gay men to change their sexual behavior amid the outbreak.
Even as cases in New York have surged, officials have struggled to respond with adequate vaccination and testing. At the end of June, as New Yorkers scrambled to get a limited supply of monkeypox vaccines, there were 300,000 doses sitting in a warehouse in Denmark, the New York Times reported on Monday. Then, once officials decided to send those doses to the US, they arrived slowly, missing a chance to slow the spread of the virus.
New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, also announced on Monday that the state had reached an agreement with Quest Diagnostics to use a PCR test on people who have a rash consistent with monkeypox.
“The real challenge with testing is that it involves swabbing lesions, which must be present for the test to assess whether the virus is also present,” the New York state health commissioner, Mary Bassett, said in a statement. “Without lesions, testing is not currently possible. And we will continue working to make sure providers know when and how to test for monkeypox.”
AlternativeAd4756 on July 26th, 2022 at 21:18 UTC »
Don’t worry, it won’t be as bad as Covid BA.5 AND Monkeypox mutant.
Continue the Rave.
GrymEdm on July 26th, 2022 at 20:28 UTC »
There are several key differences that make monkeypox unlikely to become COVID part 2. The TL:DR is -
Monkeypox does not spread easily. Infected people are easier to identify. Outbreaks are easier to contain. There are two vaccines that are effective against monkeypox.People aren't infectious until they already have symptoms, unlike COVID which is a stealthy bastard. "It seems that people are only infectious when they have those skin lesions."
The CDC says monkeypox does not readily spread by air. "It’s not a situation where if you’re passing someone in the grocery store, they’re going to be at risk for monkeypox”.
EDIT: Some stories are saying that it could be passed without contact if you are face-to-face with someone symptomatic for a long time. "According to Andrea McCollum, CDC's leading monkeypox expert, the virus requires "really close sustained contact" and is not typically "transmitted over several meters." The risk of it happening "stealthily" through the air is low. "In instances where people who have monkeypox have travelled on airplanes, no known cases of monkeypox occurred in people seated around them, even on long international flights." This edit doesn't change the CDC's statement about airborne risk and I'm including it just in the interest of absolute accuracy.
The R value of a disease is how many people a sick person is statistically likely to infect. It's not the final word of disease danger, but if the R value is below 1 each sick person is likely to infect less than 1 person which makes an outbreak self-containing. This article talks about monkeypox and says, "Most estimates from earlier outbreaks have had an R0 of less than one. With that, you can have clusters of cases, even outbreaks, but they will eventually die out on their own".
Due diligence and public awareness is important of course, but monkeypox appears to possess less potential of becoming a global pandemic a la COVID.
BlackmouthProjekt on July 26th, 2022 at 19:40 UTC »
Lol I'm reminded of the movie The Demolition Man where Huxley is explaining how society fell because a string of viral outbreaks.