It didn’t take long, did it? The Covid bus has just departed and along comes the monkeypox bus. The parallels with our experience in 2020 to date are so obvious they hardly need to be repeated. In the eight hours prior to sitting down to write this I read that the UK is ramping up efforts to contain the outbreak, anyone in the UK at risk of having caught monkeypox is being advised to isolate for 21 days which is at the upper limit for the incubation period for the monkeypox virus; normally it is 6 to 13 days. Belgium has made 21 days isolation mandatory for people with monkeypox. The WHO is reporting the rise of monkeypox in ‘non-endemic’ countries. Normally it is only endemic in West and Central Africa. The first case of monkeypox has been detected in Scotland. Meantime, the news from Downing Street is that they are ‘keeping an eye’ on the monkeypox situation and so far Boris Johnson has not spoken to Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty. Thankfully there is no evidence yet of any comments on the situation by Sir Patrick Vallance. Nobody has died of monkeypox.
So far, so good. The NHS advice regarding monkeypox is low key and experts in the USA reckon that this is not the ‘next Covid-19’. But for how much longer will Boris hold his nerve? I can well imagine that Dr Neil Ferguson, who did so much to instil Covid panic and advocate lockdown, is working on one of his famous models right now (make your own jokes up folks!) and ready to announce the coming of the monkeypox apocalypse. The members of SAGE, disbanded in the wake of Covid-19, are surely hanging on their phones. Messrs Drakeford, Sturgeon and Khan, inspired by China’s example in Shanghai, must be rubbing their hands in glee at the possibility of once again inflicting mass misery on their populations. Devi Sridhar has probably started writing her next book.
Of course, I hope I am wrong about the ultimate outcome of the monkeypox outbreak. But I am sure that over the coming days, the mainstream media will up the ante. I can’t imagine a headline in any newspaper that says: “It’s OK folks, there’s no need to panic.” Quite the opposite. The numbers of cases in the UK is so far very small, seven at the latest count. But as this creeps up into double figures as it inevitably will, how long before we see percentage increases being reported instead of actual numbers, R values being discussed, new variants and vaccine rollouts being proposed? Newspaper editors would do well to read Aesop’s fable about The Boy Who Cried Wolf; in the end nobody listened to him.
Breaking news
As I was writing this there have been two new developments:
- Within the past 22 minutes scientists are saying that monkeypox may be evolving and is becoming more transmissible
- In the last 3 hours EU health chiefs are preparing for a monkeypox vaccine rollout.
I wish I was making this up, but I’m not (filed at 14:52 on 23 May ).
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