Over 1,000 monkeypox cases confirmed in New York | New York

There are now more than 1,000 confirmed cases of monkeypox in New York City, which continues to be a hotspot for the virus, health officials said Monday.

New York reached 1,040 cases on Monday, according to the most recent information released by the city. This represents about a quarter of all confirmed cases in the United States.

The United States leads the world in confirmed cases, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). As of Monday, there were 3,846 confirmed cases in the United States and 18,095 worldwide, the CDC said. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a public health emergency on Saturday.

The virus is mainly spreading among men who have sex with men, research shows. Close sexual contact was responsible for transmission in 95% of cases, according to a recent study.

There is a divide within the New York Department of Health over whether the agency should advise gay men to change their sexual behavior amid the outbreak.

Even as cases in New York have spiked, authorities have struggled to respond with adequate vaccination and testing. In late June, as New Yorkers rushed to secure a limited supply of monkeypox vaccine, there were 300,000 doses in a warehouse in Denmark, The New York Times reported Monday. Then, once officials decided to send those doses to the United States, they arrived slowly, missing a chance to slow the spread of the virus.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul also announced on Monday that the state has reached an agreement with Quest Diagnostics to use a PCR test on people with a rash consistent with monkeypox.

“The real challenge with the tests is that they involve swabs from the lesions, which must be present for the test to assess whether the virus is also present,” said New York State Health Commissioner Mary Bassett. , in a press release. “Without lesions, testing is currently not possible. And we will continue to work to make sure providers know when and how to test for monkeypox.