Yes thankfully there are multiple extremely effective vaccines for the poxes. (So effective we have exterminated smallpox with them.)
Unfortunately supply of the two modern vaccines is limited and likely will be into 2023. (Many countries do have huge stockpiles of the classic smallpox vaccine, which is also effective. But it's, you know, the old smallpox vaccine, live attenuated virus jabbed under the skin then allowed to do its thing, hopefully without too much scarring at the injection site. You don't want that one unless absolutely necessary.)
> Infections with the type of monkeypox virus identified in this outbreak ... are rarely fatal. Over 99% of people who get this form of the disease are likely to survive. However, people with ... a history of eczema ... may be more likely to ... die.
I feel simultaneous relief and terror. While I do feel that the eczema part I've highlighted is probably some standard language around risk to people with immune conditions, I do wonder how much of a higher risk eczema poses in cases like this.
My understanding is that we don’t know for sure wha kind of virus caused Spanish flu (it occurring before our ability to analyse this kind of thing). What are you badi by your assertion that it was an orthomyxovirus on?
Scientists have been able to retrieve genetic material from the remains of those who are confirmed to have died during that pandemic. They've effectively sequenced the genome even to know how it relates to other flu viruses https://www.news.vcu.edu/article/Genetic_sequencing_of_deadl...
You might be thinking of the 1889-90 "flu" pandemic which has been theorized to be from a coronavirus known now as OC43, but it's not certain.
Could explain a little more what you mean. I have come to understand that covid belongs to the family of corona viruses that are responsible for about 15% of all colds. This monkeypox virus also belongs to a family of viruses that most of us got infected with as a child and that also has some long term effects as it can cause shingles. This monkeypox virus could also have unexpected long term effects with, for example, very severe forms of shingles.
No, monkeypox is unrelated to shingles/chickenpox. Despite the dual confusing names (chickenpox/varicella zoster) shingles is not an orthopoxvirus, but a herpesvirus. The herpesviruses do tend to cause chronic dormant infection which can reactivate.
Monkeypox isn't new. There have been hundreds of human infections since the 1950s before this recent outbreak, and it is closely related (enough for complete-cross immunity) to the other orthopoxes, which are some of the most studied viruses ever. So we know a fair bit. Pox viruses do not cause a chronic and permanent infection. A person usually either recovers and becomes immune, or dies.
Anxiety is generally correlated with systemic markers of inflammation though, so there could be some hidden variables there. Perhaps having an overly sensitive immune system predisposes one to both anxiety and long Covid, or perhaps the physical effects of anxiety on the body predispose people to maladaptive immune responses to Covid, or etc. etc.
Physical (as in, clinical?!) anxiety can be the cause of what you know as anxiety.
Having had a doctor write me off as a hypochondriac because of physical anxiety I was experiencing due to a toxicity issue...I can safely say your medical beliefs are potentially dangerous to others.
No, because there are two distinct lineages, and the lineage that's is spreading right now is the less deadly lineage.
That said, there have been additional mutations, that may be responsible for it spreading so much, or not, or may have other effects.
Monkeypox mutates much more slowly than, say, flu or SARS-CoV-2, so it seems unlikely to have a quick change in its effects, but (nearly) everything is possible in biology.
Wow, thank you for pointing this out. I have eczema and would've never though it would increase my risk against *Monkeypox*. Wild, but glad I'm better informed.
US population is 335M, 1.02M people have died from COVID. Even if 100% of people got COVID, that would be 99.7% survival rate. But we have lots of vaccination, which huuuuugely reduced the death rate, so a far more realistic death rate would be 0.6%-1%.
And of course any of the early estimates were exactly in that range. Anybody who has been advocating lower rates are all charlatans. At least every claim I have traced.
Now break that down by age. And for bonus points tell me which people died “from” Covid and “with” Covid.
All the data surrounding Covid is trash. Garbage in, garbage out. It’s gonna take a while before cooler, non politically motivated people can get an accurate figure.
This analysis has been done several times. To the best of my knowledge, even the covid policy contrarians don't see a a problem with its obvious conclusions. Here, let me google that for you: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
The results on the "Weekly Number of Deaths by Age" dashboard are pretty clear - Covid had little impact on the death rates in the under-44 group. This is not surprising, as every country that records this data shows the same result.
I'm not sure of the situation in the US, but here in the UK all of the data dashboards and death stats indicate "deaths with Covid". This is simply how they were recorded, nothing more nothing less - if you tested positive for Covid within 30 days of dying, you were a "death with Covid".
The results on the "Weekly Number of Deaths by Age" dashboard are pretty clear - Covid had little impact on the death rates in the under-44 group. This is not surprising, as every country that records this data shows the same result.
(Separate replies, as I included both statements in a reply that then got flagged. Curious which one is offensive!)
Sorry you were downvoted for your comment, I agree with it and will toss my hat into the ring of downvotes.
I spent countless hours doing data analysis on covid numbers, going to primary sources (as much as was possible).
The data is horrible.
From bad "covid id" methodology, to indeterminate and vague cause of death reporting methodology on death certificates, to mixed state and county level reporting mechanisms and weird sudden and inexplicable "boosts" in CDC all cause mortality in December, I'm completely at a loss for doing any meaningful analysis of covid data.
Until the CDC releases anonymized source data, we won't be able to perform analysis that doesn't look like confirmation bias.
> The US being the backwards country that it is, provided incentives to numerous layers in the healthcare system to lie about the Covid figures, to pump them up to get funding, so that's exactly what they did.
On my mother’s death certificate there was a space for the proximate cause of death, and following that there some cascading “due to” lines to be optionally filled in. There’s no “with” area. It’s not free form.
Her death was something like acute hypoxia (it was more jargony) and the next line was “Due To” and they filled in a sort of pneumonia, then the next line was “Due To” and they wrote Covid or something similar. Again there’s no spaces for anything extra not relevant to the cause of death.
When they count death due to Covid, It’s because it was mentioned on the death certificate as leading to the cause of death.
I'm less worried about fatality and more worried about long-term health consequences.
COVID worries me, but not because it might kill me. I'm more worried about long-term brain fog and respiratory problems. I'm more worried about being permanently disabled. I'm worried about having to life a kind of life where I feel like I'm substantially less than I once was.
But back to the point, I'm curious what the odds are of getting monkeypox and never quite fully recovering from it.
The thing that worries me about COVID-19 is the accumulative effect, too. It's a highly-contagious diseases, i.e. without measures you're gonna have it repeatedly, i.e. several times per year, it spreads so fast, it mutates so fast, and each time you go thru it results into a lasting damage, which over several infections, could turn debilitating or fatal. I puzzle how much people misunderstand it and still compare it to the flu!
The same could be with monkeypox, which I think would scare people more due to the possible scarring - people only care about things they can see! They can't see the brain/kidney/heart damage, so, they totally ignore it! But, man, these boils are terrifying and the scars would be terrifying, too, so, I expect people to take it way more seriously than COVID-9!
> If monkeypox becomes a pandemic that spreads as widely as COVID, will people look back and say the same things about people who engaged in promiscuous sexual behavior?
Judging from the when there was attention on AIDS and particularly the dialog around not following the guidance regarding safe sex on that, yes.
> Even though it is not considered a sexually transmitted infection, monkeypox can spread during intimate physical contact between people. This contact can happen when you have sex[..]
I think it's important to not let monkeypox be viewed as another "gay disease", both so people don't use that as an excuse to let their guard down, and also so that homophobia doesn't lead to violence, but we should also recognize that promiscuous sexual activity is a big risk factor.
Eric Feigl-Ding states there is evidence from the NHS that it is airborne, which gives us a very, very strong prior that there is not in fact evidence from the NHS that it is airborne.
"For individuals with infection who have evidence of lower respiratory tract involvement or severe systemic illness requiring hospitalisation, the possibility of airborne transmission has not been excluded."
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/principles-for-mo...
It's funny that in the earliest days of COVID, when there was the most uncertainty, if you wore a mask or distanced as a precaution you were called an exaggerating racist. (You obviously just hate Chinese and see them as diseased)
Only when it became predictable and appeared flu-like, posing no major threat to many demographics, did it become supremely virtuous to wear masks and distance.
Even ignoring the gaffe (though he was ultimately correct) with "masks don't work" from the surgeon general, it was only really politicized (this time, to the opposite political party) as an Other-ing moral choice once the unknowns had died down considerably.
Do masks really not work? My family has worn masks since the beginning and none of us have had Covid yet. Why would none of us have gotten it if not for mask wearing. We live in an urban environment, so it’s not like it is from not being around other people.
Disposable cloth face masks do not stop the spread of airborne viruses like Covid, which continued to spread like wildfire globally while Flu cases were at a global all time low.
With an airborne virus you need a mask capable of filtering the virus out of the air you breathe, not one that only catches the tiny droplets you spray out when you cough or sneeze.
Where do you live?! Where I live everyone that I saw immediately started wearing masks. This is literally the first time I have ever heard of a connection between mask wearing and racism.
Yeah. I suspect that putting across a message of “sexual distancing” would be incredibly difficult for public health authorities, because of the offence it would cause the LGBT community. Even if that is objectively what needs to be done. I suspect the LGBT community would be so offended by it that the advice would completely backfire.
Er, no. Calls for condom use were fine, but any suggestion that people should have less sex were regarded as homophobic and to be avoided at all costs.
Oh the political environment will go bananas if that happens, and they will go bananas if it doesn't happen. Of course the political environment going bananas is basically a day that ends in y, so :shrug:
We will probably see many reminders that it is not just a gay illness as well, which is right, correct and important but at the same time is likely to make gay sex seem less dangerous.
I think there’s a real risk of that. I see friends in the LGBTQ+ community who are extremely sensitive to public health messaging directed at us. Most aren’t, but some are.
On the bright side, I’d say that gay men in major cities who are probably most at risk of contracting monkeypox are increasingly savvy and willing to seek out a vaccine or treatment in situations like this. I know few people in my friend group who aren’t on PreP to prevent HIV, and equally few who didn’t rush to get a monkeypox vaccine as soon as the information on where to get one became available.
> If monkeypox becomes a pandemic that spreads as widely as COVID, will people look back and say the same things about people who engaged in promiscuous sexual behavior?
If they do, it will be flagged as anti-LGBTQ hate and become a bannable offense on Twitter and Reddit.
> If monkeypox becomes a pandemic that spreads as widely as COVID, will people look back and say the same things about people who engaged in promiscuous sexual behavior? Surely some will be motivated by disapproval of gays. But some will simply be observing how this spread, and what gave it enough of a foothold in the first place.
One difference between the two is that you “were killing grandma” by not wearing a mask around her or exposing yourself to the virus when you might later be around her. With MP, you have to have serious physical skin to skin contact with grandma. If promiscuous sexual behavior is the driving spread, you’d have to be getting promiscuous around grandma, or know you’ll be experiencing deep physical contact with her skin and yours. All pretty unlikely.
COVID has mutated and is now much easier to transmit. There are now monkeypox cases where toddlers are getting it. If it mutates and becomes more transmissible it seems plausible that some people will look at the history and say If we had stopped it from getting a foothold, it never would have mutated into the variant that transmits so easily through the population.
Also people were blaming people for not wearing masks even if they were never around a grandma. Just because they might get it and infect someone who might then be around someone's grandma. Being a link in the causal chain was enough to be condemned by some people.
Mask wearing is not the same as avoiding deep skin-to-skin contact or sexual behavior. You can easily avoid this behavior with grandma if you've been engaging in high-risk behavior, and you can avoid this behavior if you have to interact with your toddler.
It is much harder to avoid covid since you generally have to breath air and be around people in day to day life and it was always dangerously contagious. Skin-to-skin contact is not part of day to day life for most people (masseuses?).
The current contractors of the virus are like 98% gay men, and that group of people is - unsurprising - not very open to being told "your lifestyle is bad". That said, they're very good at finding disease in the community and making safe decisions [1]. Just like AIDS, it'll inevitably be the "normal" population that becomes the main spreading group, since that group is way less responsible overall at managing risk. Tying or attempting to blame promiscuity as the issue won't solve the problem, won't stop the spread, and it'll hurt a group of people already under constant attack.
You seem to assume that it will not mutate to become more transmissible. Comparisons to HIV seem inapt since you can't get that except by fluid exchange. This can be transmitted by touch. It currently requires lots of touch. A more transmissible version could require less.
We all hope it won't mutate, but if it does we may look back and wish we'd been more proactive at the beginning.
On the contrary, it will mutate (I'm not a viral scientist but seems expected) and it won't and isn't only sexual. Blaming sexual activity isn't reasonable because its not a "STI". Sex is a vector, but not the sole vector. It will mutate, it will spread, and it won't be stopped by telling gay people to stop having sex or shaming them for it.
Proactivity is vaccinating the high-risk, and getting the word out there on transmission vectors - and this is happening. Proactivity is setting the "global health emergency" status by the WHO so governments can be aware to start ramping up vaccine productions and teaching doctors/nurses/etc to start screening for it. Proactivity is getting samples into labs so it can be tracked, and setting up tests so we can more easily identify cases.
Proactivity is NOT shaming gay people for having sex. People were shamed for not wearing a mask with COVID when COVID was killing thousands and we didn't have vaccines and we didn't have tests and we couldn't keep hospitals functioning and old people were actively dying in alarming numbers. COVID took 14 days before symptoms started, so you couldn't adjust your risk and activities according to your health status. Today, we don't shame people for not still wearing a mask - because we have vaccines that work even better and are widely distributed. Likewise, we shouldn't shame people for engaging in sex, but instead encourage them to get vaccinated.
> Likewise, we shouldn't shame people for engaging in sex, but instead encourage them to get vaccinated.
If we had enough vaccines, they alone would be a great solution. But we don't, so we need to consider other ways to slow/stop the spread.
> it won't be stopped by telling gay people to stop having sex or shaming them for it.
For a lot of people, sexual orientation has nothing to do with how they view this. Their view would be the same if monkeypox were spreading among all young adults. Projecting anti-gay sentiment onto these people is not productive. It is also not accurate. They simply believe that it's not too much to give up promiscuous sexual behavior for 8 weeks or so. They would ask the same of straight people if it were spreading in that community.
It is a gay issue and their is an anti-gay sentiment. There has always been an extremely judgement and opinionated view of gay men and their sexual behavior in society. You can’t separate that for certain issues.
The rhetoric is “why can’t those horn dogs stop fucking [for a while]” (quote from a HN comment) NOT “why are 1M doses of the vaccine the US developed in 2001 sitting in crates in Europe and why have only 36K of them brought to the US”. SF alone has been begging the feds for 35K doses. Gay men are taking time out of their life and jobs and whatever to go stand outside hospitals hoping to get one of the few vaccine doses. People are ready and willing and a government that says “it’s just sex they can wait” is not a government that thinks “if we move fast we can stop the spread”.
Broadly, telling people abstinence as a solution is always wrong. It’s a bad policy in the face of birth control, it’s a bad policy in the face of STIs and it’s a bad policy for monkey pox. yes abstinence will prevent pregnancies but it’s not a successful way to approach solutions because it has never worked. Hell, with covid telling people to just stay home didn’t work. People protested not being able to get haircuts.
> The rhetoric is “why can’t those horn dogs stop fucking [for a while]” (quote from a HN comment)
Where is this comment? I searched the thread and the rest of HN and didn't find it.
> It is a gay issue and their is an anti-gay sentiment.
You seem to think that you get to decide what motivates other people to think things. I would think that doing so would lead to misunderstandings and conflict.
For example, people who would support temporary abstinence policies regardless of the affected groups would bristle at being told their beliefs are anti-gay (unless they are, I supposed). They might tend be your ally on many other policies and causes, but feel alienated by your accusations. This is one reason why ascribing sentiment to other people's statements might not be a great idea.
It's because the International Health Regulations confer the power to declare a PHEIC on the WHO's Director General alone, rather than the WHO as a whole (or any Emergency Committee established under it).
I wish there was more accountability for International Institution.
Saying "WHO Director Declare X" is obviously more accountable than "WHO said X must do Y" with a shadow comity deciding for 7 billion people and claiming it's not their fault when they are wrong...
I’m skeptical. I feel after agencies declare global health emergencies such as for COVID, they become more willing to declare another one for something not as severe. I see no cause for alarm until I actually hear of local cases.
Note that the WHO has declared 7 of this specific category of emergency since it was defined 2009[1], so a little more frequently than every other year. Likely only one of those emergencies significantly affected most people in developed countries. I’m not in a high risk group and I personally won’t change my behaviour because of this, just as I didn’t for Ebola or Polio.
Is it hard to believe that the WHO declaring something a global health emergency might be the direct cause of reduced infections/spread of these diseases?
> Note that the WHO has declared 7 of this specific category of emergency since it was defined 2009
I too read the second sentence in this article.
> Likely only one of those emergencies significantly affected most people in developed countries. I’m not in a high risk group and I personally won’t change my behaviour because of this, just as I didn’t for Ebola or Polio.
This declaration isn't calling for you to change your behavior. On the contrary, it's for international health communities to start coordinating before the disease has a chance to become widespread so that you can continue with your unchanged behavior.
Mainly I wanted to balance out the comments on this thread a bit as there were many which seemed overly cautious/mildly alarmist and there were too many comparisons to covid which is not particularly similar except for being a virus and causing one of these declarations.
6 mos ago when this pathogen entered the news cycle, virologists reassured that monkey pox was a stable, well-researched dna virus that didn't mutate rapidly like Covid does. Except, come to find out a few mos and a few thousand cases later, it does.
https://www.dw.com/en/monkeypox-virus-mutations-challenging-...
> Dr. Cacioppo’s research found that being alone and loneliness are different but related. Social isolation is the objective physical separation from other people (living alone), while loneliness is the subjective distressed feeling of being alone or separated. It’s possible to feel lonely while among other people, and you can be alone yet not feel lonely.
> The director-general noted that the WHO's Emergency Committee under the International Health Regulation was "unable to reach a consensus" on whether to make the declaration itself (he actually over-ruled the committee which voted 9 to 6 against the declaration), compelling Tedros to make the declaration on his own.
Likely because of significant overrepresentation in today's media/news.
For similar reasons, Americans consistently overestimate blacks and Hispanics' share of the US population. They estimate on average that 33% are black and 29% Hispanic when the true figure is less than 13% for each. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3ncaz8/til_th...>
Just because covid turned out to be a global disaster doesn't mean everything will be. There were multiple SARS outbreaks in the ever so pleasant 2000's. Oh Ebola might have gone airborne in the 90's and has made some cameos since then.
We all dropped the ball on covid, but that doesn't mean everything is going to get the same foothold. I guess what I'm saying is that I will wash my groceries again if something crazy shows up but let's not assume global pandemics are just going to kick off constantly.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadUnfortunately supply of the two modern vaccines is limited and likely will be into 2023. (Many countries do have huge stockpiles of the classic smallpox vaccine, which is also effective. But it's, you know, the old smallpox vaccine, live attenuated virus jabbed under the skin then allowed to do its thing, hopefully without too much scarring at the injection site. You don't want that one unless absolutely necessary.)
> Infections with the type of monkeypox virus identified in this outbreak ... are rarely fatal. Over 99% of people who get this form of the disease are likely to survive. However, people with ... a history of eczema ... may be more likely to ... die.
https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/faq.html
I feel simultaneous relief and terror. While I do feel that the eczema part I've highlighted is probably some standard language around risk to people with immune conditions, I do wonder how much of a higher risk eczema poses in cases like this.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478203/
We have a much firmer foundation of understanding monkeypox and it’s long term effects
You might be thinking of the 1889-90 "flu" pandemic which has been theorized to be from a coronavirus known now as OC43, but it's not certain.
Monkeypox isn't new. There have been hundreds of human infections since the 1950s before this recent outbreak, and it is closely related (enough for complete-cross immunity) to the other orthopoxes, which are some of the most studied viruses ever. So we know a fair bit. Pox viruses do not cause a chronic and permanent infection. A person usually either recovers and becomes immune, or dies.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4905
Having had a doctor write me off as a hypochondriac because of physical anxiety I was experiencing due to a toxicity issue...I can safely say your medical beliefs are potentially dangerous to others.
That said, there have been additional mutations, that may be responsible for it spreading so much, or not, or may have other effects.
Monkeypox mutates much more slowly than, say, flu or SARS-CoV-2, so it seems unlikely to have a quick change in its effects, but (nearly) everything is possible in biology.
And of course any of the early estimates were exactly in that range. Anybody who has been advocating lower rates are all charlatans. At least every claim I have traced.
All the data surrounding Covid is trash. Garbage in, garbage out. It’s gonna take a while before cooler, non politically motivated people can get an accurate figure.
I'm not sure of the situation in the US, but here in the UK all of the data dashboards and death stats indicate "deaths with Covid". This is simply how they were recorded, nothing more nothing less - if you tested positive for Covid within 30 days of dying, you were a "death with Covid".
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
"Deaths within 28 days of positive test in England" is in huge bold letters.
(Separate replies, as I included both statements in a reply that then got flagged. Curious which one is offensive!)
I spent countless hours doing data analysis on covid numbers, going to primary sources (as much as was possible).
The data is horrible.
From bad "covid id" methodology, to indeterminate and vague cause of death reporting methodology on death certificates, to mixed state and county level reporting mechanisms and weird sudden and inexplicable "boosts" in CDC all cause mortality in December, I'm completely at a loss for doing any meaningful analysis of covid data.
Until the CDC releases anonymized source data, we won't be able to perform analysis that doesn't look like confirmation bias.
What are you smoking?
On my mother’s death certificate there was a space for the proximate cause of death, and following that there some cascading “due to” lines to be optionally filled in. There’s no “with” area. It’s not free form.
Her death was something like acute hypoxia (it was more jargony) and the next line was “Due To” and they filled in a sort of pneumonia, then the next line was “Due To” and they wrote Covid or something similar. Again there’s no spaces for anything extra not relevant to the cause of death.
When they count death due to Covid, It’s because it was mentioned on the death certificate as leading to the cause of death.
COVID worries me, but not because it might kill me. I'm more worried about long-term brain fog and respiratory problems. I'm more worried about being permanently disabled. I'm worried about having to life a kind of life where I feel like I'm substantially less than I once was.
But back to the point, I'm curious what the odds are of getting monkeypox and never quite fully recovering from it.
The same could be with monkeypox, which I think would scare people more due to the possible scarring - people only care about things they can see! They can't see the brain/kidney/heart damage, so, they totally ignore it! But, man, these boils are terrifying and the scars would be terrifying, too, so, I expect people to take it way more seriously than COVID-9!
Judging from the when there was attention on AIDS and particularly the dialog around not following the guidance regarding safe sex on that, yes.
https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/faq.html
> Even though it is not considered a sexually transmitted infection, monkeypox can spread during intimate physical contact between people. This contact can happen when you have sex[..]
I think it's important to not let monkeypox be viewed as another "gay disease", both so people don't use that as an excuse to let their guard down, and also so that homophobia doesn't lead to violence, but we should also recognize that promiscuous sexual activity is a big risk factor.
Certain diseases are more like an STD than not. Saying it is not an STD is like saying HIV is not an STD.
People will argue both sides to a meaningless end. Who cares what it is… care how it spreads and what follows, etc.
Only when it became predictable and appeared flu-like, posing no major threat to many demographics, did it become supremely virtuous to wear masks and distance.
But mask wearing became popular well before we knew COVID was “flu-like”.
People forget this 180 back and forth whiplash.
It depends on what kind of mask you are wearing.
Disposable cloth face masks work very well for a virus with a droplet based spread like the flu.
>CDC says seasonal flu cases hit record lows around the world
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cold-and-flu/cdc-says-seasona...
Disposable cloth face masks do not stop the spread of airborne viruses like Covid, which continued to spread like wildfire globally while Flu cases were at a global all time low.
With an airborne virus you need a mask capable of filtering the virus out of the air you breathe, not one that only catches the tiny droplets you spray out when you cough or sneeze.
We will probably see many reminders that it is not just a gay illness as well, which is right, correct and important but at the same time is likely to make gay sex seem less dangerous.
On the bright side, I’d say that gay men in major cities who are probably most at risk of contracting monkeypox are increasingly savvy and willing to seek out a vaccine or treatment in situations like this. I know few people in my friend group who aren’t on PreP to prevent HIV, and equally few who didn’t rush to get a monkeypox vaccine as soon as the information on where to get one became available.
If they do, it will be flagged as anti-LGBTQ hate and become a bannable offense on Twitter and Reddit.
One difference between the two is that you “were killing grandma” by not wearing a mask around her or exposing yourself to the virus when you might later be around her. With MP, you have to have serious physical skin to skin contact with grandma. If promiscuous sexual behavior is the driving spread, you’d have to be getting promiscuous around grandma, or know you’ll be experiencing deep physical contact with her skin and yours. All pretty unlikely.
"Then ya you might just have yabba, but if so that is way way down on your list of potential problems."
For some reason I feel like if you're doing the nasty with your grandma that quote probably applies to you.
Also people were blaming people for not wearing masks even if they were never around a grandma. Just because they might get it and infect someone who might then be around someone's grandma. Being a link in the causal chain was enough to be condemned by some people.
It is much harder to avoid covid since you generally have to breath air and be around people in day to day life and it was always dangerously contagious. Skin-to-skin contact is not part of day to day life for most people (masseuses?).
The current contractors of the virus are like 98% gay men, and that group of people is - unsurprising - not very open to being told "your lifestyle is bad". That said, they're very good at finding disease in the community and making safe decisions [1]. Just like AIDS, it'll inevitably be the "normal" population that becomes the main spreading group, since that group is way less responsible overall at managing risk. Tying or attempting to blame promiscuity as the issue won't solve the problem, won't stop the spread, and it'll hurt a group of people already under constant attack.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/provincetown-covid-delta-outbrea...
We all hope it won't mutate, but if it does we may look back and wish we'd been more proactive at the beginning.
Proactivity is vaccinating the high-risk, and getting the word out there on transmission vectors - and this is happening. Proactivity is setting the "global health emergency" status by the WHO so governments can be aware to start ramping up vaccine productions and teaching doctors/nurses/etc to start screening for it. Proactivity is getting samples into labs so it can be tracked, and setting up tests so we can more easily identify cases.
Proactivity is NOT shaming gay people for having sex. People were shamed for not wearing a mask with COVID when COVID was killing thousands and we didn't have vaccines and we didn't have tests and we couldn't keep hospitals functioning and old people were actively dying in alarming numbers. COVID took 14 days before symptoms started, so you couldn't adjust your risk and activities according to your health status. Today, we don't shame people for not still wearing a mask - because we have vaccines that work even better and are widely distributed. Likewise, we shouldn't shame people for engaging in sex, but instead encourage them to get vaccinated.
If we had enough vaccines, they alone would be a great solution. But we don't, so we need to consider other ways to slow/stop the spread.
> it won't be stopped by telling gay people to stop having sex or shaming them for it.
For a lot of people, sexual orientation has nothing to do with how they view this. Their view would be the same if monkeypox were spreading among all young adults. Projecting anti-gay sentiment onto these people is not productive. It is also not accurate. They simply believe that it's not too much to give up promiscuous sexual behavior for 8 weeks or so. They would ask the same of straight people if it were spreading in that community.
The rhetoric is “why can’t those horn dogs stop fucking [for a while]” (quote from a HN comment) NOT “why are 1M doses of the vaccine the US developed in 2001 sitting in crates in Europe and why have only 36K of them brought to the US”. SF alone has been begging the feds for 35K doses. Gay men are taking time out of their life and jobs and whatever to go stand outside hospitals hoping to get one of the few vaccine doses. People are ready and willing and a government that says “it’s just sex they can wait” is not a government that thinks “if we move fast we can stop the spread”.
Broadly, telling people abstinence as a solution is always wrong. It’s a bad policy in the face of birth control, it’s a bad policy in the face of STIs and it’s a bad policy for monkey pox. yes abstinence will prevent pregnancies but it’s not a successful way to approach solutions because it has never worked. Hell, with covid telling people to just stay home didn’t work. People protested not being able to get haircuts.
Where is this comment? I searched the thread and the rest of HN and didn't find it.
> It is a gay issue and their is an anti-gay sentiment.
You seem to think that you get to decide what motivates other people to think things. I would think that doing so would lead to misunderstandings and conflict.
For example, people who would support temporary abstinence policies regardless of the affected groups would bristle at being told their beliefs are anti-gay (unless they are, I supposed). They might tend be your ally on many other policies and causes, but feel alienated by your accusations. This is one reason why ascribing sentiment to other people's statements might not be a great idea.
Interesting that he chose "I" over "we". I wonder if there was internal dissent during the forming of the resolution.
Saying "WHO Director Declare X" is obviously more accountable than "WHO said X must do Y" with a shadow comity deciding for 7 billion people and claiming it's not their fault when they are wrong...
Does anyone?
Indeed there were posts on this forum in the early days about it with first hand accounts. No such accounts with this so far?
Personally, a school friend was one of the first cases in the country.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Health_Emergency_of_I...
I too read the second sentence in this article.
> Likely only one of those emergencies significantly affected most people in developed countries. I’m not in a high risk group and I personally won’t change my behaviour because of this, just as I didn’t for Ebola or Polio.
This declaration isn't calling for you to change your behavior. On the contrary, it's for international health communities to start coordinating before the disease has a chance to become widespread so that you can continue with your unchanged behavior.
Mainly I wanted to balance out the comments on this thread a bit as there were many which seemed overly cautious/mildly alarmist and there were too many comparisons to covid which is not particularly similar except for being a virus and causing one of these declarations.
That's irrelevant.
https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/social-isolation-loneliness-old....
Alone but not lonely, life hacked.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/147824/adults-estimate-american...
(This is one of my favorite stats.)
For similar reasons, Americans consistently overestimate blacks and Hispanics' share of the US population. They estimate on average that 33% are black and 29% Hispanic when the true figure is less than 13% for each. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3ncaz8/til_th...>
We all dropped the ball on covid, but that doesn't mean everything is going to get the same foothold. I guess what I'm saying is that I will wash my groceries again if something crazy shows up but let's not assume global pandemics are just going to kick off constantly.