Sad news informs the revision to odds on measles cases this year:
Betting is on 834 cases; on January 20th (Trump’s inauguration), the betting was for 180.
As of 2/20, CDC reports 93 cases.
This is an entirely preventable disease. Someone in authority should be urging vaccination. It’s also useful to note that non-vaccination has negative externalities even for those vaccinated.
I can remember when literally every kid in the neighborhood had measles… and mumps… and chicken pox. It was expected and meant a miserable week for each one, but then you moved on. Now 1,000 cases nationwide is startling. Vaccinations have been tremendously effective against these basically non-mutating viruses as opposed to SARS or even the “common cold” viruses (about 200 of them) which seem to evade vaccine containment efforts.
Putting 93 or 180 or 834 into perspective. A PBS article from 2019:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-bad-is-the-measles-comeback-heres-70-years-of-data
https://www.scribd.com/document/413752574/Measles-Cases-in-U-S-1950-to-June-13-2019-PBS-NewsHour
2011
Measles cases surpass 200 for the first time since elimination, driven by U.S. travelers catching the disease overseas. Measles breaks out in European countries — namely France, Italy, Romania, Spain, and Germany — and ultimately spreads across the continent.
2014
The U.S. records 667 measles cases across multiple outbreaks caused by imports, mostly from the Philippines, raising concerns about the integrity of herd immunity. The year ends with an outbreak at Disneyland in California, which spills into the subsequent year.
2021-24
About 11 million unvaccinated “travelers” enter the US in “undocumented fashion”.
Amazing how measles and polio are beginning to catch the attention of the press these days.
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/why-polio-is-making-comeback
Questions are being asked… why hasn’t Trump fixed this yet?
It must be wonderful, for enemies of the USA, to behold a formerly great nation, with good public health policies in decline.
In a brief history of the disease, the Centers for Disease Control writes that between 1953 and 1963, when the measles vaccine became available, “nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years of age.” Yearly, “400 to 500 people died, 48,000 were hospitalized, and 4,000 suffered encephalitis (swelling of the brain) from measles. Those 400-500 people were people that were missed, 48000 hospitalizations were expensive, 4000 cases of encephalitis could have serious long term consequences. Not everyone just moved on.