There are now more than 1,000 confirmed cases of monkeypox in New York City, which continues to be a hotspot for the virus, health officials said on Monday.
New York reached 1,040 cases as of Monday, said the most recent information released by the city. That accounts for about a quarter of all of the confirmed cases in the US.
The US leads the world in confirmed cases, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). As of Monday, there were 3,846 confirmed cases in the US and 18,095 globally, the CDC said. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a public health emergency on Saturday.
The virus is spreading primarily among men who have sex with men, research has shown. Close sexual contact was responsible for transmission in 95% of cases, one recent study found.
There is a divide in New York City’s health department over whether the agency should advise gay men to change their sexual behavior amid the outbreak.
Even as cases in New York have surged, officials have struggled to respond with adequate vaccination and testing. At the end of June, as New Yorkers scrambled to get a limited supply of monkeypox vaccines, there were 300,000 doses sitting in a warehouse in Denmark, the New York Times reported on Monday. Then, once officials decided to send those doses to the US, they arrived slowly, missing a chance to slow the spread of the virus.
New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, also announced on Monday that the state had reached an agreement with Quest Diagnostics to use a PCR test on people who have a rash consistent with monkeypox.
“The real challenge with testing is that it involves swabbing lesions, which must be present for the test to assess whether the virus is also present,” the New York state health commissioner, Mary Bassett, said in a statement. “Without lesions, testing is not currently possible. And we will continue working to make sure providers know when and how to test for monkeypox.”
