Personally, I’m going to prematurely blame dumbass white people importing exotic pets.
The stuff bubbling up so far is a combination of blaming Fauci and Biden, blaming covid vaccines, and calling it fake.
I can easily see the racist right calling it “n-word pox” but I think the messaging from Fox News and the right wing media sphere is going to be blaming it on the Biden administration. That’s where the political payoff is.
I’m prematurely going with our lackluster response to COVID and idiot anti-vaxxers, if for no other reason than to balance out them blaming our overzealous COVID response and vaxxers.
If you’re right, I hope you continue to be right
Good news: early sequencing indicates that it is most closely related to the 1% fatality rate clade, not the 10% one. As was expected.
https://twitter.com/borges__vitor/status/1527436883093078029
Some thoughts:
- The “gay plague” angle is really nuts. Very, very likely it’s ascertainment bias—sexually active gay guys are more alert about STD risk, so they go to a doctor when they get a weird rash. Just amazing that public health agencies are suggesting gay sex is a risk factor when the biology suggests that kissing or, you know, getting breathed on, is enough to spread it. “You should get tested if you were in close contact with an infected person. “Close contact” means being within 6 feet for more than a minute, or them fucking you in the ass.” It’s especially funny because the veiled homophobia is always dispensed with the woke-y “gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men” phrasing.
- The optimistic (I think?) take is that there’s a large, undetected Monkeypox outbreak in Nigeria that has been seeding cases around for a while, and it’s only being noticed now. The alternative is that the guy who left Nigeria on May 4 is the index patient for the whole outbreak, which implies terrifying things about contagiousness. In either case, I have real skepticism about containment.
- Severity is a big question mark. One reason the slow-spread interpretation is optimistic is that severe cases are more likely to be detected, so if the virus has been spreading over time (in both Nigeria and the West), that means lots of people had it and didn’t end up dead or in the hospital. The current variant is part of the less-virulent strain of monkeypox, and who knows how much of the 1% reported CFR for it is due to the effects of poverty/poor detection of infections vs intrinsic severity.
- Vaccine picture is murky. The state of the art vaccine is apparently not available in large numbers. The one that there are huge stockpiles of is the ACAM2000 vaccine. Both vaccines seem legitimately alarming. The newest version, which was developed as a safer version of ACAM2000, has something like a 1% rate of causing myocarditis.
- No idea how well therapeutics work or how available they are.
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Where are you seeing this?
I was thinking of this WHO statement, but it seemed much milder than I remembered. Turns out it was stealth edited. The original version included this:
A detailed backwards contact tracing investigation is also being carried out to determine the likely route of acquisition and establish whether there are any further chains of transmission within the United Kingdom for all cases. Sexual contacts and venues visited (for example saunas, bars and clubs) are actively being investigated for the four GBMSM cases.
The “for example” parenthetical is what got edited out, but are they not investigating sexual contacts of the straight cases or any bars they may have visited?
I saw it a few places too.
We have a global monkeypox tracker:
We’re up to 12 countries with confirmed cases, plus a suspected case in Israel. The 12 are: Spain, Portugal, UK, Italy, Canada, Belgium, Australia, France, USA, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands.
We’re up to 87 confirmed cases and 57 suspected. 146 total.
That of course doesn’t include the ongoing outbreaks in Africa.
I don’t have it in me to follow another one of these.
On a scale of 1-10 how much do I need to worry about this?
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3, imo. At least for right now.
Just sort of analyzing the list, the fact that we see it in Australia already can’t be a good sign. Like the original strain of COVID had an estimated R0 of 2-3, and if I recall correctly, it took a while to get past 2-3 countries. Now, it wasn’t as easy to distinguish a mild covid case from a random cold, and testing wasn’t widespread… Maybe we’re catching all the monkeypox cases and we were catching ~no covid cases, but still…
It’s really hard to expect this to have an R0 < 1.0 and/or little/no human-to-human transmission at this point, right?
The good news is we already have a vaccine that should be 85% efficacious, and I assume most developed countries have large stockpiles of it. The absolute worst case scenario seems to be vaccinating everyone against it over a period of 1 to 3 months and then being fine, so if you can stomach being careful for a few months, then it should be fine.
Now what that does to the economy and supply chains is another story.
Scale of 1-10, my concern about the spread is at like a 6.5/10. My concern for my health and way of life beyond the next ~3 months is like 1/10. My concern financially is in between somewhere.
Sounds like a nuthingburger but I might still prefer covid, given the choice, without having had either yet. Might start boil washing the bedclothes, continuing going commando and steering clear of hotels etc.
Monkeypox can be spread when someone is in close contact with an infected person. The virus can enter the body through broken skin, the respiratory tract or through the eyes, nose or mouth.
It has not previously been described as a sexually transmitted infection, but it can be passed on by direct contact during sex.
It can also be spread by contact with infected animals such as monkeys, rats and squirrels, or by virus-contaminated objects, such as bedding and clothing.
Most cases of the virus are mild, sometimes resembling chickenpox, and clear up on their own within a few weeks.
In 2003 there was an outbreak in the US, the first time it had been seen outside Africa. Patients caught the disease from ‘close contact’ with prairie dogs that had been infected by small mammals imported into the country. A total of 81 cases were reported, but none resulted in deaths.
I’m at about a 4 until we get hard confirmation of sustained human-human transfer.
The widespread geographical range of the cases confirmed so far doesn’t make human-to-human transfer seem overwhelmingly likely?
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I dunno, there was an outbreak of 70 people all across the Midwest with no human-human transfer. I believe in waiting for confirmation for stuff like this. Should know more in a week.