From the outset, part of the answer is “no”, since the WHO had decreed this highest level of alert – called public health emergency of international concern — on January 30, 2020 regarding COVID, which did not prevent the epidemic from becoming the most serious health crisis of its kind since the Spanish flu. In fact, the WHO alert had not prevented the vast majority of countries from waiting mars 2020 before starting to react. At most, the alert in question requires countries to share their case data with the WHO and recommends a course of action.
But even a quick reaction today might she control this epidemic? The difference with COVID is that this smallpox is less contagious and that available vaccines presumably give long-term immunity: in theory therefore, controlling the spread of the virus would be easier.
Conversely, however, to be sure of controlling it, it would be necessary to do enough screening and contact tracing, if only for what is called a ring vaccination — targeted according to contacts of infected people — and few countries have done so so far. In the United States alone, the belief is spreading among experts that the epidemic is much more widespread than official figures say. “Screening is appalling”, headlined June 25 a report by NPR public radio. “For many of the confirmed cases, health authorities do not know how the person got the virus. Those infected have not traveled or been in contact with another infected person. This means that the virus is spreading in certain communities and cities, in enigmatic ways. »
Most cases, it should be remembered, are mild. No deaths had been reported in Europe or North America as of June 26. Knowing that two months ago we were talking regarding a death rate of 3%, this is reassuring news: this rate was what we observed in the only 11 countries, all African, where the virus was so far endemic. , and these deaths occurred mostly among young children, recalled in May a review of studies on the subject. But that doesn’t explain why the current “outbreak” of monkeypox is so much bigger than any previous ones.
And there is even a moral question behind it all: one of the criteria behind a “public health emergency of international concern” is that it is, in WHO jargon, a “extraordinary event”. COVID certainly qualified in January 2020. But monkeypox, it, seems to have been growing for at least a decade in ten African countries. As sums it up on Twitter science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt, “it is unfair and unethical to determine that an event is extraordinary only if it occurs in rich countries”.
