COVID prepared CT health officials for monkeypox
COVID-19 helped public health officials in Connecticut manage the monkeypox outbreak, according to Department of Public Health Commissioner Manisha Juthani.
There have been no new cases of monkeypox in Connecticut for about a month. As of Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 143 people in Connecticut have tested positive for the disease. Though the virus is waning nationwide, nearby states are still identifying cases. New York and Massachusetts, for example, saw monkeypox cases regularly over the course of November.
Though the viruses are very different, as was the response required for each, COVID put public health officials in a state of readiness that better allowed them to manage monkeypox.
“It prepared us,” Juthani said. “There was a lot of mental muscle memory there that had been recently activated in a number of different ways so that it was clear what needed to be done.”
Monkeypox is different from COVID in some significant ways. It’s not a respiratory virus, though there was some concern at the start of the outbreak last summer that it might be. And this variant of monkeypox evolved to present in a distinct way, producing lesions in and around the anus, meaning it primarily, though not exclusively, affected a specific population.
“In this situation, the evaluation was, this disease is not a respiratory disease,” Juthani said. “It’s not spreading like wildfire, where today we have five, the next day we have 50 and the next day we have 150 and onwards.”
But when monkeypox re-emerged, the COVID pandemic had been ongoing for years. That meant public health had mechanisms in place to disseminate vaccines, a better educated and more aware populace, and a media landscape prepared to spread public health messages.
“I think we learned from the lessons of COVID,” Juthani said. “Public health was primed and ready to go, figuring out how we were going to take the bull by the horns right away.”
Connecticut was the last state in the area to confirm a monkeypox case, and though there were not yet vaccines available to distribute, the conversations on strategy began immediately.
Juthani recalled that she had been on a phone call with Rochelle Wallensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after which she got a sense of urgency about monkeypox, even though Connecticut had not yet seen a case: “I said, ‘I think we need to set up some sort of incident command for monkeypox.’
“We didn’t have a case, we didn’t have anything, but we knew that we needed to get the infrastructure set up, so we were ready to go as soon as we had a case,” Juthani said. “I think we met several times before we had a case. We were just ready. We were ready and waiting.”
Vaccines were not available to states until a case had been identified, which Juthani said was frustrating. But it also meant “we weren’t caught blindsided,” she said.
“We were like, ‘OK, this thing is coming, and it would be naive to think it won’t be here,’ and then, instead of being reactive, I wanted us to be proactive,” Juthani said. “I wanted us to be ahead of the game so that we could do that as soon as it became a reality for us.”