The story of monkeypox in the United States looks, to experts, like a frustrating repeat of the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, USA Today reported last week.
“The tests took too long to get started. The data did not reveal the full extent of the outbreak. The spread was not stopped quickly enough,” according to the US daily.
Monkeypox is supposed to be different, because it’s much harder to transmit, treatments and vaccines are already available, a lot is known about a virus first described in 1958, and that many lessons are believed to have been learned from COVID-19, according to the daily.
“Yet the United States is now experiencing the strongest wave of monkeypox in the world”, with nearly 9,000 Americans registered as infected on Monday, the American daily said.
“And these are only the known cases. No one knows the full extent of the American epidemic,” the daily added. “It’s as if we were reliving the same nightmare. We are really in the fog,” noted the daily, quoting Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University.