The wide geographic distribution coupled with the low case counts (around 100) suggests there’s a large outbreak that’s the source of all of these (ie Nigeria).
Things got really, really bad in Wuhan before an appreciable number of cases were exported. Even for a city like NYC or Paris, only a tiny fraction of the population travels internationally in a given period of time.
The 2 cases in Australia are in different capital cities, they both arrived from the UK/Europe in the last week. One of them had mild symptoms before he left the UK, it doesn’t look like there has been any local transmission here yet.
Right, but that suggests human-to-human transmission and an R0 > 1.
I mean, on top of that, the way this thing is spreading all over the world is super concerning. Think about how long it took COVID to get all around the world, and I’ve got to think there is more travel in and out of Italy from the rest of the western world than in and out of Nigeria from the west. I just googled it and it looks like ~1M tourists per year in Nigeria and around 94M in Italy.
Unless there was some sort of event in Nigeria I’m not aware of, it’s hard to imagine all of these cases were contracted in Nigeria and spread this quickly to this many places.
So this would all but confirm human-to-human transmission, it definitely makes it very likely.
We’ve basically never seen this kind of spread with monkeypox, the likelihood is that it’s become more transmissible either through a mutation or through increased human susceptibility for some reason. Or some combination thereof.
I find it odd that they keep referencing the transmission among the gay community. My understanding of monkeypox is that there’s nothing about it that makes it more or less transmissible based on that. There’s a possibility this outbreak originally hit the gay community and moved through it by happenstance, or that because the gay community is more likely to stay on top of their health/hygiene in this regard they’re identifying the cases first, but the likelihood that a straight person is less likely to show up with a case tomorrow than a gay person doesn’t seem very high.
I can think of three ways to interpret this. I assume that it means that a large portion of the cases they’re seeing are in gay men. This could mean:
This aged well.
https://twitter.com/enemyinastate/status/1527995154006786048?s=21&t=MfyqjF8CztLaU4ZPVCS8ig
Seems like bad news.
Yeah not great, but it seems like it’s yet to be fully confirmed from scientists that those are a lot of changes over four years and that the changes are having a material impact on the situation. But it does start to make that quite a bit more likely, as this information in context of the situation points in that direction.
re: the title of this thread. I’ve seen that phrase so many times now that I think it might be some sort of Berenstain Bears type thing. Mercutio’s line in Romeo and Juliet is “A plague o’ both your houses!” Not pox. Plague.
Wait, there are people who think it’s ‘pox’?
I just assumed for the thread title they substituted Monkeypox for ‘plague’, since it would qualify as a plague.
Yes. Googling the exact phrase gets lots of results, although half of them seem to be people making the same point I did.
Reading in various places that a lot of cases are being linked to a huge pride festival in the Canary Islands, which would align with theory #2.
Hm. Maybe something like one or more people involved with exporting exotic pets caught a bad batch of rats, went to a pride festival and didn’t do a great job with washing their hands after work.
Could be. One thing that doesn’t quite add up is that the person who was suspected of being the index case in the UK was hospitalized before this festival started and started showing symptoms in Nigeria. So either he was the index case, and he infected someone else who went to the festival (seems like a stretch?) or there were at least two cases exported from Nigeria: that guy plus someone who went to the pride festival.
I googled the Pride festival and this was one of the top results:
Or someone from Nigeria went to the Pride festival, infected one or more people early on, and by middle of the festival (It was May 5-15), they were contagious and infected others, who by the end were contagious… Then they all got on planes and flew home.
Also possible that it’s circulating among that rodents in the Canary Islands, much like it spread in prairie dogs in the US. Maybe someone in the Canary Islands has an exotic Nigerian rat and it bites a mouse or something.
A scenario where the outbreak in Nigeria is worse than anyone suspected, perhaps with a lot of asymptomatic cases - I suspect that in the next decade we will learn that there is way more asymptomatic spread of all diseases than we ever imagined, could lead to exporting a few cases here and there and this time a chain of transmission was established through a Pride festival, which was the perfect set of circumstances. Long enough to establish a few generations of spread, lots of physical contact, tons of people available to infect (80K) from all over the world, and they fly back just before realizing they’ve got pox on their body.
Yeah that’s possible, too. Although then, we’d expect to find a lot of cases in the Canary Islands, wouldn’t we? 2.2M people live there, and as far as I know we haven’t heard of any cases from there. The cases in Spain were in Madrid, I believe.
Am I the only one here old enough so that his first association to the Canary Islands is the Tenerife plane collision in 1977?
Given we are likely to see an increased proliferation of these kind of diseases as we cook the planet, this might be an appropriate time to start adapting by normalizing good masks indoors as ordinary course and ending unfettered international travel (bonus points for the massive carbon reduction from the latter).