There are now nearly 1,500 cases of monkeypox in the US, spanning nearly every state state in the country.
According to CDC data, as of 14 July, there were 1,470 cases of the diseases across 43 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
The biggest clusters tend to be in states with large populations or big cities, like New York (414 cases), California (180 cases) and Illinois (160 cases).
Monkeypox has spread globally since the first cases were reported in May, with confirmed cases in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and the Middle East.
The disease is overall seen as less of a mass threat than Covid because it was already known to scientists, treatable with vaccines and medications, and spreads largely through close physical contact. It is rarely fatal and doesn’t usually lead to visits to the hospital.
Still, according to public health experts, the US has failed to adequately respond to the monkeypox outbreak, despite the intense focus on the US health apparatus during the pandemic.
Monkeypox should’ve been addressed decades sooner, when it was spreading among rural populations in Central and West Africa, according to UCLA epidemiology professor Dr Anne Rimoin.
"If we do want to get in front of emerging infectious diseases, we are going to have to prioritize dealing with emerging global disease threats at the site where they are spreading early on," she told NPR. "We are totally interconnected by trade and travel, population growth, population movement, and we cannot make the mistake again of thinking that an infection that’s happening somewhere in a remote area of the world isn’t going to affect us right at home."
The US was caught flat-footed by the spread of monkeypox, which scientists say has been spreading during this particular outbreak largely between men who have sex with other men.
Similarly to the beginning of the Covid pandemic, testing for monkeypox cases initially needed to follow a cumbersome process, with local doctors petitioning state epidemiologists to approve samples being sent to federal CDC laboratories, leading to major impacts on the ability of doctors to track the spread of the virus in a timely way across the country.
Monkeypox testing in commercial labs began this week.
“The machine is just so ossified,” Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist, told The New York Times, saying the “house is on fire, and it’s like everything is moving at sort of normal speed.”
In 2010, the US projected it would need 132 million doses of the vaccine that treats smallpox and monkeypox in the event of a bioterrorist attack, but the strategic national stockpile only holds 64,000 doses of the most recent iteration of the vaccine.
