We understand how the flu behaves. We've had >100 years of flus and Spanish Flu only happened once.
The only experience we have with poxes in humans is smallpox and monkeypox. Smallpox was not a good time. Past monkeypox outbreaks have killed 5%. This one is behaving very differently, but we don't know if it's going to revert to killing people! It has in the past, like every outbreak, so it's a rational worry.
This news started to break and fear mongering ticked up once the vaccine was out, to get people accustomed to the idea that one vaccine won’t be enough.
I came across the nextstrain site [1] in March, where they showed multiple variants in the wild, concentrated to certain regions.
The media is turning this into a bigger deal than it is, else they’ll lose control over the population. Imagine what would happen if there wasn’t constant coverage of the est. case count...life would go back to normal.
I may be misunderstanding you, but in case I was misunderstood: I didn't mean to say that the virus is harmless. It may have longer-term effects, and just because it is more deadly when certain conditions are met, we shouldn't just throw people who meet these conditions under the bus, or assume it's going to be harmless in other cases - it isn't.
But it's hard work not to fall for the paranoia that is fed (partly as side-effect) by the current attention-seeking headline-business formerly known as news.
Monkeypox was pretty clearly a non-event for the vast majority of the population pretty early on. There continued to be misleading and fearmongering reporting for weeks and months after that was obvious, because of the well-known phenomenon where media gets more clicks and eyeballs if the "news" is bad. Also, Covid doomers really wanted a 2nd thing to be depressed about.
Whether or not Monkeypox is a real threat is a question mark, but the outrageous Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf fear-porn tactics by health officials and the media over the last 2 years on Covid has ensured that a substantial portion of the public has no trust that anything that they're told on health matters is accurate. If there's a pandemic in the near future, society seems set to implode because so many people will not believe it.
The news is just an explanation of what is happening right now, a spectrum of severity because of this. It’s neither good news or bad news. At the end it’s either Vaccine or herd immunity.
Makes you wonder if the real “virus” is a mental one? Society got infected with one hell of a meme.
It is like everybody has that X-Files “I want to believe” poster on their wall when they repeat some of this doomsday stuff.
We are all stuck inside all day, bouncing around with nothing better to do than read doomsday porn. And around and around that stuff goes into people’s head until you get where we are now.
People should be much less concerned about this virus and way more concerned about social unrest. Humans are social creatures. You can’t just “lock” people in their homes for an indeterminate amount of time and expect good things to happen.
Those toilet paper memes and work from home memes are funny at first, but once the novelty wears off over the next week or so, shit is going to get very real. It ain’t funny to see empty shelves of toilet paper or baby wipes when you actually need them.... it ain’t funny to have absolutely nothing to do but sit around and obsess about this virus.
- monkey pox really doesn’t transfer easily between people. There have been cases of it being brought to Europe/Us before but very little onwards transmission
- a common transmission vector this time appears to be men having sex with men - close contact indeed
- it’s a DNA virus so it doesn’t mutate anywhere near as fast as an RNA virus like flu or Coronaviruses
- people are infectious when symptomatic
- a vaccine already exists, just isn’t in use, and the disease is fairly well understood
Additionally, with a long-ish incubation period of 1-3 weeks, it is likely that cases will still keep going up for a while while awareness increases.
But all in all, it seems like much more easily avoidable than Covid. Even so, it feels like it’s being taken seriously, which is quite reassuring.
What you linked to is a single article that has not been peer reviewed, on a month old virus strand.
No one said panic, but worried. Being prepared is the wise choice, as opposed to “turn off the news”.
Let me take a wild guess: if I go to the trouble of searching for old comments from you on HN from early 2020, will I find similar baseless dismissive content?
This makes it sound like we (perhaps inadvertently) screwed up and might now be facing pathogen that kills 1 to 10% of the infected and against which we're poorly prepared. You're better off reading something from 2022 by the same author (Ed Yong), a science reporter and Pulitzer winner for his COVID-19 coverage.
Monkeypox (like COVID) causes undeniable, obvious symptoms. How many less obvious virii are circulating at all times? How many are causing fatalities? How should we estimate that and what should we do about them...
Media impact and counter-reaction probably made COVID worse in the US... We need to stop doing public health policy with the news.
we live in the phase of the epidemic where alarmist news flourish
just as with any evolutionary process when the environment rewards a kind of behavior that behavior will become preponderant.
in this case even though it is far more likely that the virus would become less dangerous that idea gets less exposure, people will more likely read the scarier news.
If anything, the virus shows how mainstream media messaging that Global Warming is a CATASTROPHE and that we have to PANIC right NOW to prevent it, is counterproductive when a real panic comes around (and noone takes you seriously).
There's multiple people here suggesting everyday people spread a possibly less lethal strain, in ways that will likely spread every other contagious disease they also had.
https://nitter.net/edwardrussl/status/1497767342914162692#m
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