Monkeypox thread

[heltok]

Is there any risk that Monkeypox becomes the next pandemic? What’s the probability that R0 is above 1 in the west?

Here is a tracker, as of today there has been 120 cases confirmed/suspected in the west:

BNO News Monkeypox Tracker

Tracking monkeypox cases and deaths around the world. Live updates.

bnonews.com

Australia is reporting a case from a traveller from UK, US reporting a case from a traveller from Canada without any known direct links to Africa. This is unsual for this virus in west, indicating that something might have changed with regards to its transmissibility.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1527581552942759937

Picture of a boy with Monkeypox:

 

[theocguy]

it is serious.

 

[heltok]

A spreadsheet of what he know of the cases so far:

Monkeypox_Public_www.global.health - Google Drive

docs.google.com

Seems that most of the cases are men and a large part of the spread seems to have happened through sexual contact between men.

 

[heltok]

260cases now, up from 120 4days ago:

BNO News Monkeypox Tracker

Tracking monkeypox cases and deaths around the world. Live updates.

bnonews.com

Starting to feel more and more like a pandemic to me. Nobody else interested in following this?

 

[heltok]

370 cases, spain 145 of these.

 

[heltok]

440 cases, average/day still going up:

 

[heltok]

600 cases now.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1531403430564184064

Pandemic in slowmotion and nobody seems to care as we have been tired of pandemics already. Might be a costly mistake to let it spread to animal reservoirs outside of Africa.

How bad could the monkeypox outbreak get?

Health experts are optimistic monkeypox can be contained. Here’s why, and where it could go wrong.

www.vox.com

Imo the big problem with scientists saying things like ”it’s containable” is that this is not a falsifiable statement. Imo they should say statements like ”we will not get more than 1000 confirmed cases in united kingdom”, that’s a falsifiable statement. And then if it starts to become obvious that their mental model of the world was incorrect, they can begin to try to process what that means about staying on the current path and if different actions should be taken.

 

[heltok]

We have a vaccine and treatment, plus transmission is difficult unlike covid so it's a meh on a scale of care.

When you say we, do you mean every country in the world? And will we give it to all animals also? And if transmission is so difficult, why have we suddenly gotten 600 confirmed cases plus a factor of unconfirmed cases around the world? Currently it is doubling every 4 days(fwiw that’s 130 days to 8B cases). Not saying it will continue to grow, but imo your arguments doesn’t explain the past and not sure if we will have time to act with vaccines everywhere.

So far nobody has died, but monkeypox mostly kills the young and so far they have not been infected in large numbers.

 

[heltok]

Monkeypox is "not gaining any traction" as a discussion topic. There's a good reason for that. It's just fear-mongering. COVID has all the pandemic bases covered. The chances that a new COVID variant is the "next pandemic" is about ten thousand times greater. Or pick your own big number.

Care to elaborate why it’s just fear mongering? Cases/day keeps growing, if that continues we will get high numbers eventually.

I agree that BA.4-5 is a larger threat right now, but that doesn’t mean that smaller threats should be ignored. It’s all about the combination of probabilities, cases and outcomes. And even if it’s a small probability, the sum might end up very large…

 

[Bet TSLA]

Care to elaborate why it’s just fear mongering? Cases/day keeps growing, if that continues we will get high numbers eventually.

I agree that BA.4-5 is a larger threat right now, but that doesn’t mean that smaller threats should be ignored. It’s all about the combination of probabilities, cases and outcomes. And even if it’s a small probability, the sum might end up very large…

Because it's all about relative risk. COVID is dangerous. Relatively speaking, monkeypox is not. This is the last I have to say on the subject. It's not worth my time.

 

[heltok]

Because it's all about relative risk. COVID is dangerous. Relatively speaking, monkeypox is not. This is the last I have to say on the subject. It's not worth my time.

Ok. So basically saying that monkeypox has the potential to become a pandemic is fearmongering because monkeypox is relatively not dangerous. Like WHO says, the CFR is not very high because it is between 3%-6%:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1530570883210919938

Just to not get attacked for my post I will clarify: I was not saying that CFR is 3-6%, I was poking fun of something WHO said. For me 1% is very high. I would assume in the west with modern medicine CFR will likely be below 1%. Still a very nasty disease with permanent scarring on the skin and likely internal also.

 

[heltok]

Guess I am not winning any popularity points, but will continue anyway:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1530843395740024832

https://twitter.com/x/status/1530843407618383873

More than 550 monkeypox cases have been reported in 30 countries, WHO official says | CNN

The World Health Organization is now counting more than 550 monkeypox cases worldwide, the group's technical lead for monkeypox, Rosamund Lewis, said Tuesday on CNN International.

edition.cnn.com

(CNN)The World Health Organization is now counting more than 550 monkeypox cases worldwide, the group's technical lead for monkeypox, Rosamund Lewis, said Tuesday on CNN International.
"We actually have today a count of over 550 confirmed cases in 30 countries across four of WHO's six regions," Lewis said.
"What we're seeing now is really quite different," she said, given that the outbreak is happening in multiple places at once.
"We're seeing cases all appearing in a relatively short period of time. We're seeing that in a few days, in a couple of weeks, we're seeing over 500 cases. This is different. This has not been seen before."
In an update over the weekend, WHO said that as of Thursday, it had received reports of 257 confirmed monkeypox cases and about 120 suspected cases in 23 nations where the virus is not endemic.
Lewis said WHO does not know the source of the outbreak and called on countries to take advantage of the "window of opportunity" to keep cases from unfolding into a greater outbreak.

 

[heltok]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1531920606232465410

My biggest worry right now is that it could be reaching animal reservoirs in India, African countries and other countries without effective testing systems and that this will evolve to have higher R. And frankly I am getting don’t look up vibes from how this is being ignored by the world.

 

[heltok]

Maybe one day people will read this thread:

 

[jjrandorin]

Guess I am not winning any popularity points, but will continue anyway:

At this point, you are simply bumping your own created thread that no one else is participating in here, which is not allowed.

 

[heltok]

Sorry for bumping this again. But I feel that this is in the interest of the forum. We are now at 2100cases. (some sources claim 2300)

I am gonna predict 23june WHO will declare it a pandemic.

Monkeypox Outbreak Poses ‘Real Risk’ to Public Health, W.H.O. Official Says

Dr. Hans Kluge, the organization’s director for Europe, said that the longer the virus circulated, the wider its reach would be.

www.nytimes.com

GENEVA — The World Health Organization’s top official in Europe on Wednesday called for urgent action by the authorities and civic groups to control fast-rising cases of monkeypox that he said posed a real risk to public health.
Europe has emerged as the epicenter of an outbreak of monkeypox, with more than 1,500 cases identified in 25 European countries, which account for 85 percent of global cases, the official, Dr. Hans Kluge, the W.H.O.’s director of its European region, said at a news conference.
The W.H.O. will convene its emergency committee in Geneva next week, Dr. Kluge added, to determine if the outbreak constitutes a public health emergency of international concern, a formal declaration that calls for a coordinated response between countries.
“The magnitude of this outbreak poses a real risk,” Dr. Kluge said. “The longer the virus circulates, the more it will extend its reach, and the stronger the disease’s foothold will get in nonendemic countries.”

For now the response by the governments are to sit tight and assess:

 

[heltok]

We are now past 10k cases. Imo it seems that the trend is still exponential. So I guess we sit tight and assess a bit longer.

 

[heltok]

Cases going up in US rapidly in the last two days, now >1800 cases.

Could be an artifact of increased testing capacity. Meanwhile UK seems to be growing less slowly, could also be an artifact. Sit tight and assess.

 

[NikolaACDC]

US monkeypox outbreak: Demand for vaccines outstrips supply

"US health officials say they do not have enough monkeypox vaccines to cope with surging demand.
The US has seen more than 1,800 cases so far, though that is thought to be an undercount as testing has also lagged.
...
"We don't yet have all the vaccine that we would like in this moment," US Centers for Disease Control director Rochelle Walensky told a news briefing on Friday.
The US has received 370,000 out of nearly 7m vaccine doses that the government has purchased in total. But millions of the doses are not expected to arrive until next year."
------------------------
Guess one can always hope that it won't get too bad...

 

[heltok]

As Fauci warns monkeypox needs to be taken more seriously, former FDA commissioner says the window to control it 'probably has closed' | CNN

As cases of monkeypox continue to rise in the US, a top health official is stressing that the outbreak needs to be handled in a more rigorous manner.

edition.cnn.com

"This is something we definitely need to take seriously. We don't know the scope and the potential of it yet, but we have to act like it will have the capability of spreading much more widely than it's spreading right now," Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN Saturday.
Former US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb warned it may be too late to control and contain the virus.
"I think the window for getting control of this and containing it probably has closed. If it hasn't closed, it's certainly starting to close," Gottlieb told CBS' Margaret Brennan Sunday on "Face the Nation."


So we have to act like it will have to the capability of spreading much more widely. Good that we are doing that. And great that we have been doing such as job of doing that up to this point. We really learnt our lesson from Covid…