As far as Corona is concerned, we Europeans are now jaded. The fact that the pandemic is currently also plaguing North Korea, even officially, is therefore not as exciting as the outbreak of monkeypox.
Image: EPA
Interest in Corona is clearly waning, but a new plague arrives just in time to stimulate party talk with a pinch of sex.
Pest and cholera are rarely mentioned, although people still die from them. Most people think of influenza as a harmless cold, and somehow people have gotten used to Ebola in Africa. But when Zika became the focus of world attention a few years ago and was declared a “public health emergency of international proportions” in 2016, the little ABC of pathogens for exciting party talk got a new chapter that isn’t as unspeakable as chikungunya fever. The year 2020 then gave the world “Corona”, which is as easy on everyone’s lips as a beer with lime – and turned 83 million national coaches into a nation of virologists.
A for monkeypox. And what about AIDS?
After two years of the pandemic, they are familiar with it, so that they are now plunging into monkeypox with a renewed appetite for the creeps. Perhaps because Corona has been chewed through to the last spike protein turn too often and no one is interested in anthrax anymore, the monkeypox suddenly rampant in Europe are giving onlookers sugar. The outbreak also mixes a pinch of sex and stigma into media events, which after scandals à la Ischgl or Downing Street No. 10 seems to crave.
So now Gran Canaria. Since there is generally a low risk of infection for the population and infections are usually mild, this epidemic is obviously a good way to suppress a lot in a resurrected party collective: that chapter C like Corona – like many others – is not over yet, while chapter A like monkeypox is already reopened. And that we should actually have understood how we all make a decisive contribution with our travel behavior to the fact that epidemics spread globally and also keep them away from their areas of origin.