Despite the World Health Organization declaring mpox a global health emergency last week, federal health officials say they have no plans to shut down schools if an outbreak occurs domestically.
The talk of another potential virus outbreak in the U.S. may give some flashbacks to March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the world, leaving students and adults at home to quarantine.
However, federal health officials have declared that mpox is not like COVID-19 and it isn’t transmitted the same way.
“It’s not airborne,” Dr. Michelle Taylor, director and health officer of the Shelby County Health Department in Memphis, Tennessee, shared with NBC News. “Based on the science, I just don’t believe that’s going to happen.”
While the current mpox outbreak in Africa has left health officials worried, they continue to stress that it would be extremely unlikely for the virus to cause school closures in the U.S.
This was echoed by Christina Hutson, the head of the poxvirus and rabies branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This is not like Covid, where there’s nothing visible on somebody,” Hutson told NBC News, adding that with the virus, “you actually can see the lesions on somebody. Unless you’re directly touching them, you’re not going to get infected.”
So how is mpox spread?
The CDC says that while COVID-19 was a respiratory virus that spread through the air, mpox spreads through skin-to-skin contact with the lesions an infected person has on their body.
Touching contaminated items like clothing or bedding can sometimes lead to an infection.
The virus causes not only lesions on a person’s skin but also fevers, headaches, and muscle aches.
The current strain of the virus is known as Clade I, while the strain that was being transmitted in 2022 is known as Clade II and was mainly transmitted through men who have sex with men.
So far, nearly all of Clade I cases have been limited to African countries, with high infection rates in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
So far, only one country outside of Africa has confirmed a case of Clade I mpox, Sweden. At this time, no cases of the virus have been detected in the U.S.