Throughput: MPox Redux Edition
Photo Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
[ThTh1] Two years ago, I wrote about the outbreak of monkeypox, now know was mpox. This disease, part of family of viruses that includes smallpox, has broken out again, triggering another public health emergency from the WHO. As of this writing, at least 14,000 cases are known, involving at least 456 deaths. Although the vast majority of the cases have been in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, cases have been detected as far away as Sweden and Pakistan, which makes it likely it has spread globally.
Unlike the 2022 outbreak, this one involves the more deadly Clade 1. Just as a comparison, the 2022 outbreak had 100,000 confirmed cases but only 200 deaths. There are also indications that it may be more infectious. The last pandemic hit children and homosexual couples hardest. This one seems to be targeting adults and heterosexual couple as well.
So are we about to go into COVID-style lockdowns? Is this going to be The Big One?
Not necessarily. Right now, our indications are that the new mpox strain still requires contact with bodily fluid or skin-to-skin contact. This at least makes the spread of mpox slower as evidence by it taking seven months to even get this far. We also still have the defenses I outlined in the previous post on this: vaccines that are specific to mpox and a smallpox vaccine that is 85% effective. Probably the immediate thing to do is to star vaccinating healthcare workers and other who have high risk of exposure. It might also be wise to screen people traveling from infected areas. Those who contract it should be encourage to isolate and to help with contact tracing.
As I said in my previous post:
COVID-19 is not the last viral challenge we will face. The world is flat. And increasing human population and global warming may drive further outbreaks. If you like, we are entering a state of cold war against disease that will occasionally flare up into hot wars like the COVID-19 outbreak. Now is not the time to relax; now is the time to be more vigilant.
Our defense were tested with mpox and mostly held. Now we’re getting a much more through test. I am hopeful we will pass this one rather than descend into conspiracy theory nonsense. But my hopes on this front have been dashed before.
[ThTh2] And while we’re on the subject, a new paper looks at how our responses to COVID-19 worked out by comparing the infection and death rates in areas that had different policies. The conclusion? Vaccine mandates and school mask mandates were extremely effective in slowing the spread. Stay-at-home orders and closures were somewhat effective. Prohibitions on mask and vaccine mandates were associated with big increases in hospitalization and death. The difference between places that mandated vaccines and places that forbad mandates was 200 deaths per 100,000 people. For a state the size of, say, Florida, that would mean 40,000 deaths. For reference, real life Florida lost almost 100,000 people to the pandemic.
I would be cautious in these results. This is one study focused on the US and there’s a lot more work to do. Laws do not necessarily reflect compliance: people in states without mask mandates masked up, people in states that banned public gathering gathered anyway. As Kevin Drum points out in the link, they didn’t study the impact of ventilation or remote work. But study after study has been pretty clear: vaccines worked; vaccine mandates worked; masks were good, especially in schools; everything else was meh. And prohibitions of vaccines/mask mandates were disastrous.
I have little confidence that this will make a difference. Facts have never swayed the COVID denialists from their narrative that this was an overreaction or a super secret plot to take over society, get Joe Biden elected and make the MCU movies mediocre. But it’s important the information keep getting put out there. Because, as I noted above in the context of mpox, this is not going to be our last goat rodeo.
[ThTh3] In related news, a new nasal vaccine is showing good effectiveness in stopping COVID.)
[ThTh4] Social media is good sometimes.
[ThTh5] I would say that tech dudes never seem to learn how easy it is to get “AI” to start spewing offensive gibberish. But in the case of Grok’s latest woes, I’m starting to wonder if it’s deliberate.
[ThTh6] For a long time, I’ve told my students that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are going to collide and merge in about five billion years time. This is no biggie; it happens all the time in this rambunctious universe. But a new study is casting doubt on this. Using the latest estimates of the masses and motions of galaxies in the Local Group, they calculate only a 50-50 chance this happens within the next ten billion years.
The supernova explosion that created this object was first observed on Earth in February 1987. Chandra sees X-rays produced by debris from the explosion. X-rays from Chandra (purple); optical and infrared from Hubble (red, green, blue); infrared from Webb (red, green, and blue)
[ThTh7] How did astrologers not see this result coming? Not only are their predictions bad, their predictions don’t even agree with each other.
[ThTh8] A Mars rock has shown clear hints of past life on the red planet. Unfortunately, it may be a decade or two before we can bring it back to Earth and confirm the findings.
[ThTh9] So what is JWST up to? Maybe solving one of the biggest puzzles in cosmology. The Hubble Tension is the difference between nearby measurements of the expansion rate of the universe and measurements made from the distant reaches of the cosmos. Those measurements should agree but don’t. However, a new paper by Wendy Freedman using JWST data may have made the problem go away. Still a lot work to do on this, though.
[ThTh10] Livermorium is one of the heaviest elements in the periodic table, one that can only be created in a lab. A new technique is forging it much more easily, which maybe open up a new group of superheavy elements, including ones that could theoretically be stable (Livermorium only lasts a fraction of a second).
This bit of science is extra satisfying because it as brought to my attention by Dianna Cowern, a great science communicator who has been out of commission for over a year from long COVID. Here’s hoping she’s on the road to recovery.
[ThTh11] A new study estimates that nuclear panic in the wake of Chernobyl cost 300 million life years by causing more consumption of fossil fuels.
[ThTh12] We’re very very close to helping Jimmy Carter achieve one his goals: outliving the guinea worm.
[ThTh13] Astonishing work on making people with disabilities able to communicate:
Our new study is out today in the New England Journal of Medicine! We demonstrate a speech neuroprosthesis that decodes the attempted speech of a man with ALS into text with 97.5% accuracy, enabling him to communicate with his family, friends, and colleagues in his own home. 1/9 pic.twitter.com/G1yJu2MDns
— Nicholas Card (@NS_Card) August 14, 2024
[ThTh14] And just to close things out, here’s a JWST image of Supernova 1987A.
The supernova explosion that created this object was first observed on Earth in February 1987. Chandra sees X-rays produced by debris from the explosion. X-rays from Chandra (purple); optical and infrared from Hubble (red, green, blue); infrared from Webb (red, green, and blue)
Mpox, from what I understand, is still primarily transmitted though… how to say delicately… “intimate touching”.
You won’t get it from picking up a can of beans at the grocery store that someone else has licked while making a viral video.
Unless that has changed… Is the new variant of Mpox something that you’ll pick up if you’re not wearing gloves when you go to the grocery store after someone viral goes there?Report
Previous iterations were spread by skin-to-skin contact or bodily fluids (or by eating the meat of infected animals). So it would spread rapidly among kids when they were playing and so on. Right now, we still think that’s the case and it doesn’t spread through fomites. So that can of beans fine. But it may be more easily caught in skin-to-skin contact.Report
ThTh2:
We can’t undo the damage that was done by the anti-vaxx and anti-mask people, but in a few months there is a national election and the American people do have the ability to reject the politicians who lied their asses off and campaigned on fear and ignorance and cost the lives of tens of thousands of peopl eneedlessly.
And we can and should name them directly- they are primarily located in the Republican Party of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.Report
Let’s not forget that the bureaucratic federal administration, in particular Fauci, LIED (his admission) to the American public about the advice he gave to the public. Politicians like–that’s what they do. Federal employees should NOT lie. Frankly, I consider that far worse than a politician lying.Report
ThTh2 – To be clear, there were no statewide vaccine mandates. As the article says,
“Additional data on COVID-19 related mask and vaccine mandates were incorporated including whether state government or school employees were required to or prohibited from being required to be vaccinated as of February 2022, and whether there were mask requirements in schools. The details of state vaccination mandates varied. Typically, the requirement was that state and local government employees be vaccinated or subjected to regular testing. Sometimes the vaccination mandates covered other groups, such as healthcare workers or staff in some health care facilities.”
It also looks like they only counted state restrictions, not local ones. In MD, rules varied by county based on severity.Report