Understand the differences between monkeypox and Covid-19

At first glance, all the news looks a little too familiar.

A new virus outbreak is detected. It begins to spread around the world, case by case, country by country. Health officials take action, tracking infections and issuing guidance.

After two tortuous years, it’s understandable that the wave of monkeypox cases is bringing back some bad memories of early 2020, when the world first became aware of Covid-19.

But health experts have been clear since the first cases emerged: while the public should be aware of the smallpox outbreak, the two diseases are very different and there isn’t the same cause for alarm as there were two years ago.

“This is not Covid,” Jennifer McQuiston, a veterinarian and deputy director of the Division of Pathogens and High Consequence Pathology at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said in a statement last week.

US President Joe Biden also sought to decouple the two diseases in the public’s understanding.

“I don’t think it reaches the level of the kind of concern that was there with Covid-19,” Biden told reporters on a recent trip to Tokyo. It was a marked change from comments he made the day before when he said “everyone should be concerned”.

Of course, several leaders tried to calm citizens when Covid-19 first emerged, and the virus turned into a once-in-a-generation pandemic. So how exactly is monkeypox different from Covid-19 – and why experts are so much more relaxed about this outbreak?

More importantly, monkeypox does not spread as easily as Covid-19 .

“Respiratory spread is not the predominant concern” with smallpox, Jennifer said. It is only transmitted between humans if there is very close contact with an infected person — such as sharing clothes or bedding, or through saliva — according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The symptoms of monkeypox, in particular the rash that usually appears on a person’s body, are also more detectable than the symptoms of Covid-19. And asymptomatic spread — which complicated early efforts to contain the coronavirus — has not been documented in monkeypox, according to a 2020 study.

“Smallpox can be a serious infection,” particularly in low-income countries where screening and treatments are not readily available, Michael Head, a senior researcher in global health at the University of Southampton in the UK, told CNN last week. There are no reported deaths from the current outbreak.

However, in the developed world, “it would be very unusual to see anything more than a handful of cases in any given outbreak, and we will not see (Covid)-style levels of transmission,” Head said.

But perhaps most important of all, the Monkeypox is not a new disease . At smallpox vaccines can be used to fight the virus there is a wealth of scientific research about how the disease works and does not mutate as quickly as Covid-19.

So if the headlines about monkeypox transport your mind to March 2020, it’s worth a look.

“This is a virus that we understand: we have vaccines against it, we have treatments against it, and it spreads very differently from SARS-CoV-2 – it is not as contagious as Covid – so I am confident that we will be able to keep our control around it,” White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha told ABC’s Martha Raddatz Sunday.

Source: CNN Brasil

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