Monkeypox infections in New York City are found predominantly in men — with more than half of cases also being found in lesbian, gay, bisexual or queer people.
Officials in the Big Apple revealed the first snapshot of demographics of people who have been infected with the tropical virus.
Of the 336 cases in the city — the most of any single location in America — 321 are in men, with no confirmed cases in women. The remaining five percent of cases are divided between transgender people and cases where the gender is unknown.
Transgender people were not included in the LGBQ community in the data.
The virus has been known to erupt among communities of gay and bisexual men around the world in recent months after it was first detected in Europe, and this data confirms that the virus is also affecting the community in New York.
In total, over 11,000 cases have been detected in countries where the virus is not endemic as part of this outbreak – including 1,470 in the United States
According to NYC Health, every single person with a confirmed infection in the city is between the ages of 20 and 69, with a media age of 35.
The virus has overwhelmingly harmed men in the city. Almost every case has been confirmed in a man – which would make sense given the sexual networks the virus has traveled to date.
While no cases have yet been confirmed in women, there are still eight cases where the person’s gender has not been recorded.
Straight people have also largely avoided the virus, with just two confirmed cases in the group.
Around 60 percent of the confirmed cases belong to the LGBQ community. Transgender people were not included in this group.
The sexuality of the infected person was unknown in 40 percent of the cases.
However, monkeypox has spread across racial groups. About one in three cases affects whites, with one in five in the Hispanic community.
Those numbers are likely grossly undercount, however, as officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have come under criticism for failing to get the virus under control.
Monkeypox was allowed to spread undetected due to flaws in America’s testing and surveillance infrastructure – much like how Covid was allowed to spread so widely so early when it caught the world off guard in early 2020.
Unlike Covid, however, monkeypox is nothing new and experts are frustrated at how senior officials have failed to deal with a threat they were already familiar with.
“Why is it so hard for something that’s even a known pathogen?” dr Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at UCLA, told the New York Times.
‘How many times do we have to go through this?’
America’s response to monkeypox has been marred by a fragmented and limited testing system and limited access to vaccines that could help Americans forestall infection.
Appointments for monkeypox vaccination in NYC are booked MINUTES after opening
Dozens of people lined up for monkeypox vaccinations in New York City on Friday as the city launched its second vaccination campaign.
The queue – mostly men – snaked around the side of the Chelsea Sexual Health Clinic in Manhattan this morning.
Gay or bisexual men who have had multiple sex partners over two weeks are being offered the vaccine again in America’s monkeypox capital, along with anyone who has been exposed to a patient with the tropical disease.
But the 2,500 available dates for the Jabs ran out in minutes yesterday as thousands rushed to grab a spot.
Health officials have been blasted over a “technical glitch” that allowed so many people to book slots early via an old link that was already full by the time the first batch was released, and frustrated New Yorkers said they had “zero chance” . to get a push.
At a news conference last week, the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan said the locations were chosen because three quarters of the cases were in Manhattan.
This included about a third specifically in the Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen neighborhoods.
The health department uses Twitter primarily to let people know when vaccines are available, leaving those who don’t use the application on a regular basis down.
On Wednesday it was announced that another 6,000 cans had arrived from the federal government.
When a person experienced symptoms of the virus, they were first tested locally for the orthopoxvirus family.
If positive, their sample would need to be sent to the CDC for confirmation — a process that could take days.
This meant that even if you worked as fast as you could, case numbers in the US would always be days behind.
Some of those testing gaps have since been filled, with the CDC announcing in recent days that both Labcorp and the Mayo Clinic have been contracted to expand testing capacity.
Yet access to monkeypox testing is extremely limited and scarce in a country of over 330 million people.
“It’s pretty clear that we need to rapidly expand the ability to diagnose this now,” said Dr. Jay Varma, a Cornell University public health expert who advised the New York City Mayor’s Office during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some experts compare this lack of testing to where America was early in the Covid pandemic.
A key difference is that the scientific community had no idea what Covid was when it first emerged, and how to diagnose it was still unclear.
With a virus like monkeypox, which is endemic in some parts of the world and occasionally pops up in the United States, experts believe the same mistakes should not have been repeated again.
“We clearly identified this as a major mistake that allowed Covid to leave its footprint in the US and spread undetected for a month without either of us knowing… and now we’re doing the same thing again, because that.” is how it’s done,” said Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a public health expert at Canada’s University of Saskatchewan, told the Times.
Vaccine implementation has also been patchy. American officials are believed to have around 800,000 doses of the two-stage Jynneos vaccine – a number that may not be nearly enough.
When vaccines became available, supply could not meet demand. In New York City — the nation’s virus hotspot — walk-through events to get the shots often reach peak demand within minutes of opening.
This failure to properly track and prevent the spread of the virus has many experts concerned that the virus will become endemic in the US, as it has in parts of West and Central Africa.