Monkeypox is no joke. Neither is using it as an excuse to impugn your favorite targets. This is a disease that you actually can pick up via an unfortunate handshake. It can be carried in a cough. There's even some evidence that the present strains can go airborne. It is carried in the scabs and ooze from the pustules on infected people. You can get it by prolonged close contact -- and that includes sex. Nevertheless, it's not a sexually transmitted disease: STDs do not easily transmit any other way but sex (or blood-to-blood contact). This stuff gets carried from person to person with far less intimate contact.
At present, a lot of the transmission in the U.S. is among gay men, and apparently by closer contact than a handshake. But it spreads much too easily to stay there.
Illness spreads rapidly when it finds a favorable environment. Anything that goes airborne or is carried in exhaled droplets, anything that can be spread by casual contact, will spread when it gets into a dense-enough population. Schools, for instance. A coughing stranger at the mall, a sneeze in church, and then an active week at school means it will spread, and among a young population it may spread very rapidly.
So will a search for blame. In today's fraught sociopolitical environment, what might follow from that could be very ugly.
The last two-plus years have soured my optimism about the good nature of my fellow citizens. I hope people don't get crazy, but a thin thread of hope is all I've got.
We've already got the tools to deal with this -- handwashing, distance, masks, staying home when you are sick. There's even a vaccine, and production is ramping up. There's way less mystery about this bug than there was about coronavirus and we can stifle it. "Can" is not "will." I don't know if we've got the will. Especially not when it makes such a convenient excuse to spin conspiracy theories and yell at people with whom we disagree, instead of actually doing anything.
I admit I feel nothing but pessimism about this outbreak. We're gonna screw it up, just like we screwed up COVID, even though this is like an "easy mode" pandemic because we already have a vaccine and apparently the CFR is below that of COVID.
ReplyDeleteAlso very much feels like COVID round 2 as we're ramping up to be asked to stay at home, distance from other people, and mask up (I never really stopped that last, at least not in places where I didn't know people, but I guess I mask up on campus again). I just feel......I don't know, an exhausted doom when I hear the news, like "I've seen all this stuff before and it wasn't good, I really don't want to see it again." Existentially tired at this point.