If you’ve been keeping an eye on the news lately, you certainly heard that the medical world now seems more concerned about monkeypox than COVID. In Europe, the number of infections with the non-pandemic viral disease has even tripled in just two weeks, and the World Health Organization (WHO) is on alert.
As for how things look on the other side of the ocean, the situation is not too encouraging. According to The Hill, health experts are now worried that the US might lose control of the ongoing monkeypox outbreak because the authorities reacted too slowly. Until now, 30 American states reported infections with monkeypox.
The US is reacting to monkeypox similarly as it has done to COVID
The experts are comparing the current situation with the one from the early days of the COVID pandemic, when the US didn’t seemed to act as it should. As it happened over two years ago, there aren’t enough tests, for instance.
But since monkeypox is not a new virus as it happened in the case of COVID, there is plenty of hope that things will improve. There’s a lot more information available about monkeypox than it was about the coronavirus in the early months of the still ongoing pandemic.
Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, explained as The Hill quotes:
We as a global community have known about it for decades. We know how it spreads. We have tests that help identify people who are infected. We have vaccines that are highly effective against it.
However, there is still plenty of hope that the situation will improve, at least in the US. Just a few days ago, our publication shared the news about monkeypox vaccines becoming available to all the US population that might have been exposed to the virus. Health experts are telling us that anybody can become infected with monkeypox.