LogFAQs > #965212717

shadowsword87 posted...

People being scared of a new infection happens every 3 years. This last one actually hit us.

Pretty much. As someone who actually works in public health and has access to 20-odd years of historical documents, I can say that every single public health scare in that time frame has had authorities paying close attention to it and preparing various contingencies and countermeasures. Most of the time, it either turns out to not be a big deal, or the countermeasures that get deployed end up being enough to keep it from being a big deal, so the public never really has anything to worry about (often resulting in "why did they make such a big deal out of this thing that only killed like two people after they made considerable efforts to keep it from killing more?", which is less than valid logic). Covid turned out to be more than the first couple lines of defense were able to control, so it turned into a major problem.

Will monkeypox be a new pandemic? Almost certainly not. This outbreak is weird and kind of concerning, and we may well end up seeing non-negligible mortality from it, but it doesn't sound like it's anywhere close to transmissible enough to cause serious problems worldwide, plus treatments and vaccines are already readily available. I expect a handful of relatively isolated outbreaks, maybe some regional vaccination campaigns, and certainly some considerable efforts from public health agencies to keep it from being a problem (which will go largely unrecognized), but nothing overly catastrophic in the public eye. Still, expect it to see media coverage for as long as it seems like it might be a threat, just as we saw with H1N1, Ebola, Zika, SARS, and every other example in recent memory.