Janice R. Andrews
As worries grow after the World Health Organisation declared mpox a global health emergency, social media is filled with rumours that schools might have to close. Students in the U.S. are talking about their worries online because they are still remembering the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns.
Many TikTok users felt the same way when they titled a video, “I’M NOT MISSING SENIOR YEAR BC OF MONKEYPOX.” The video quickly got nearly 1 million views. Another video that went popular and got over 8 million views played a version of “Forever Young” with the words “2024: ‘did you see they shut down some schools?'” This video showed how scary it would be to have another lockdown.
“Children have been through this before,” said Dr. Michelle Taylor, who runs the Shelby County Health Department in Memphis, Tennessee, and is also the health officer. “They don’t want to do it all over again.”
But government health officials want to make it clear that the mpox outbreak is not the same as COVID-19. They stress that the two viruses are very different, and there isn’t much chance that schools will have to close.
Chris Hutson, who runs the poxvirus and rabies branch at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said, “This is not like COVID, where you can’t see anything on someone.” She said, “With mpox, you can actually see the sores on someone.” You can’t get sick from them unless you touch them directly.
Understanding How Mpox Spreads
Mpox, which used to be called monkeypox, is a virus that causes fevers, headaches, muscle aches, and sores on the skin that hurt. MPV is mostly spread through close skin-to-skin touch with sick sores, while COVID-19 is spread through respiratory droplets in the air. It can also be spread by touching things that are already infected, like beds or clothes.
At the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Dr. Paul Offit is a paediatrician and infectious disease expert. “What was scary about COVID was that it can spread without symptoms,” he said. “That’s not true about mpox.”
There are different types of the mpox virus, which are called clades. Clade II caused a world spread in 2022 that mostly affected men who have sex with other men. Cases are still happening in the U.S., but they are much less common than they used to be.
Clade I, a more dangerous and deadly type, is currently spreading in parts of Africa, which is making health officials very worried.
“Risk of School Closures and the Spread of Mumps Right Now”
Most of the cases of Clade I have been in African countries, mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Only Sweden is one of the places outside of Africa that has reported a case of clade I mpox. The U.S. has not reported any cases.
The CDC’s modelling studies show that the chance of group I mpox spreading in the U.S. is still low, even within homes. It is very different for most people in the DRC to live there than in the U.S., Hutson said. Living conditions in the DRC are very crowded, which makes it hard to separate sick people, which helps the virus grow there.
Schools Will Stay Open
Professor of medicine and infectious disease expert at Emory University in Atlanta, Dr. Carlos del Rio, says that the idea that U.S. schools might have to close because of an mpox breakout is “absolutely not” on the table.
He said, “This virus is dealt with in a very different way” than COVID-19. Since mpox has been studied for decades, experts know more about how it spreads and how to control it now than they did in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Taylor said again that there is no proof that the mpox virus is changing or growing in a way that would require schools to be closed. She said, “I just don’t think that’s going to happen based on the science.”
