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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

BNONews has been making a dashboard for every maybe-virus the past year (recently they had Monkeypox and some other one, Marburg maybe)? None of those turned into any major problem. They're pandemic profiteering, so while I appreciate the data they're collecting, I'm not quite ready to start freaking out about it.

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Monkeypox was(/is? Idk) not a non-event, it was very real and relevant professionals were concerned about it. I don't know where 'BNONews' is based, but since China's in the title of this one I'll point out there were 'monkeypox' cases in the UK too for example.

Just because it fortunately didn't go (/hasn't gone!) like SARS-nCoV-2019 doesn't mean it wasn't worth reporting.

Monkeypox was pretty clearly a non-event for the vast majority of the population pretty early on. There continued to be misleading and fearmongering reporting for weeks and months after that was obvious, because of the well-known phenomenon where media gets more clicks and eyeballs if the "news" is bad. Also, Covid doomers really wanted a 2nd thing to be depressed about.

It remained a non-event for the vast majority of the population because the most vulnerable proportion of the population participated in a widespread vaccination campaign. If a little extra screen time in the media made that campaign successful it paid dividends for public health, imo.

Because the messaging was so muddled by attempts to amplify fear[1][2] or to avoid stigma, straight people showed up to vaccination sites and took very limited Monkeypox vaccine capacity from the sub-population who was actually at risk. At the time, I read opinions[3] from gay men who would have really preferred that the messaging was more explicit about who was at risk (so that gay men knew to get vaccinated and straight people knew they weren't at much risk).

[1]: There were articles about fear of Monkeypox spreading in K12 schools, despite a notable lack of unprotected anal sex in a typical K12 setting. https://www.curbed.com/2022/08/monkeypox-nyc-schools-no-guid...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/health/monkeypox-masks-cd...

[2]: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/finally-some-good-news-about-mon... and https://www.joshbarro.com/p/how-not-to-talk-to-the-public-ab...

I'm heterosexual and I checked the quantities locally they were always bountiful before I went for my shots.

It doesn't seem like there was any effort to rebalance the amounts, seems more like a bureaucratic issue that had nothing to do with me. Once a municipality got their allocation, that was that.

the most vulnerable proportion of the population participated in a widespread vaccination campaign

It looks like about 425k men were fully vaccinated, and another 250k got a single vaccine. That's not amazing compliance if you assume the vulnerable population is somewhere in the 3-16 million range.

https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/mpox/response/2022/vaccines_dat...

> That's not amazing compliance if you assume the vulnerable population is somewhere in the 3-16 million range.

The subset of gay men having unprotected sex with many partners is significantly smaller than the total population of gay men (about 7 million in the US).

>Monkeypox was pretty clearly a non-event for the vast majority of the population pretty early on

Just like how it's pretty clear that the coronavirus wasn't "a global emergency"?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/health/china-virus-who-em...

Monkeypox isn't airborne, so it's pretty easy to avoid contracting.

No it wasn't but because your gamble won and with hindsight bias you can state that now.

If you think that is responsive to my comment, you're thinking of a much earlier point in time than I am.

In the mid-2010s both Ebola and Zika got a media boost as well, and Candida auris in 2019 or so.

The difference with Ebola though is just how insanely bad it is - I cannot think of a virus I would NOT want more than Ebola.

Thankfully the fact it is so damn destructive also means it is harder to spread en masse.....

I wouldn't call Monkeypox a maybe virus, especially along with these. Its spread was mostly limited to a single community (sexually active gay men), and it absolutely would have spread out of control had there not been a very strong vaccination campaign with high rates of compliance. Within that community, there were many people who were impacted and many others who changed their behavior to help mitigate to spread.

>sexually active

I think you meant "promiscuous".

Potatoe potato

Why do these viruses often appear in China first? Has there been any study to find out any common patterns? Is it the food? Culture? Living environment?

Don't forget sheer number of people.

India is almost the same size but doesn’t seem to have this pattern.

Yeah, probably not sufficient on its own, but I bet it's a factor. It amplifies the others.

The big question is why doesn’t it happen more often via India?

Quick guesses:

Maybe Indians have less contact with wildlife (due to different settlement patterns, or religious or cultural restrictions on eating wild animals?), or less average physical mobility (more expensive and inconvenient long-distance transportation), or a climate less conducive to certain modes of virus transmission?

A smaller fraction of the population working or commuting in huge indoor spaces?

Maybe (contrary to Americans' intuition) Chinese public health surveillance is both more effective and more transparent than Indian, leading to a measurement bias because some disease outbreaks that arise in China get better-documented?

China is much more urbanized, India's population is still majority rural. And China also has a more robust public health system, which means that more cases get detected in the first place.

The sheer size and population of China?

When I visited South China, everything was crowded. Sick building syndrome is probably more common due to the common use of AC and large shopping malls people hang out at as well as recirculating air. My friend in India said that she did not get constant electricity in Gujarat so AC wasn't as common everywhere.

The viral jump from animals to humans is a common mechanism in many of the worst pandemics, with covid-19 and hiv being prime recent examples. There's some evidence "the spanish flu" of 1918 came from swine.

If I were working on the problem "how can we reduce the frequency new very dangerous viruses are introduced" I would pay attention to this aspect.

The solution to this problem is the same as nearly every other problem humans create: stop destroying ecosystems and animal habitats, stop expansion, reduce meat eating, etc. These things increase the transmission of zoonotic diseases. There was a really good article in 2020 that I can now not find where an expert discussed how these things are not new, COVID was not a surprise, and that these transmissions will do nothing but increase in frequency if we don't systematically tackle these problems.

> The viral jump from animals to humans

I thought the most likely origin of Covid-19 is a lab leak (at least according to the latest from the DOE and the FBI), likely from gain-of-function research gone wrong?

No – even that DOE report gave it a low probability ranking. It’s perfect for conspiracy mongers because you can’t completely rule out the possibility but the evidence has pretty consistently pointed at a non-lab jump, possibly in the wet market, and that’s not surprising since it’s a common scenario scientists have been warning about for decades.

See for example this recent analysis:

https://zenodo.org/record/7754299

> even that DOE report gave it a low probability ranking

Well, specifically, they assessed with "low confidence" that the "most likely" source was a lab leak. Meaning they think the wet market theory is less likely, though also with low confidence.

I do note in the analysis you linked that the authors admit to unusual circumstances around the data they used, and that the source of the data is the Chinese CDC. Given the obvious incentive on the part of the Chinese government to disclaim a lab leak, I'm hesitant to take this as conclusive evidence.

One possible reason for delayed virus detection in the West is our sluggish response to identifying new strains (in some of our largest countries, not all). But I think the emergence and spread of serious viral infections is largely influenced by population density, rather than geographical location. And the population density in China has gone up a lot in about the last decade, making more serious transmissible diseases come out of China recently.

When Covid's first wave saw exponential infection growth, statistics and graphs demonstrated striking similarities among urban areas worldwide. In contrast, rural regions consistently exhibited lower infection rates throughout the pandemic.

To illustrate this with a personal anecdote, I know someone who lives in a tiny village on a ranch (population: ~30), and they have reported seeing zero Covid cases, having interacted with around 50 other people over the last four years. I think this underscores the role of population density in virus transmission.

People in China also interact more closely with animals, and with a wider variety, than in the West. The West does not have any wet markets or nor the wide variety of species available for consumption. This helps in the virus jumping species. Once it jumps, the population density helps it spread.

Ever been to a county fair?

Once or twice, although it wasn't a major sort of fair. There were a lot of animals, and now that I think about it, quite a wide variety of chickens. But it's only a few weeks out of the year, and in summer. And not very much blood. (Don't know if blood makes a difference in this case, though) I'm still a little shocked by the (large) fish gills I saw hanging up on a wall in a market in Hong Kong some years ago, looked like it was still breathing.

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