‘Not Again’: A Weary Europe Greets Monkeypox With a Touch of Fatalism
LONDON — With the cost of living soaring, a devastating war in Ukraine and the coronavirus still circulating, many Europeans had already been feeling anxious and drained.
Then came some more unwelcome news: Monkeypox, a rare viral illness that causes pus-filled rashes, had appeared in more than a dozen countries in the region. “My first reaction was: Another plague coming to us?
What’s next?” said Adrián Sanjosé, 38, from Spain, as he sat at Rome’s Fiumicino airport waiting to fly to his home in London. “We have a pandemic, a war, what else?” But for some people, with a threshold for worry already tested by the coronavirus, initial bewilderment about a disease few had heard of before its reported appearance in Europe this month quickly faded into a sense of weary fatalism. “I’m trying to be positive and not think about it,” Sourena Naji, a 27-year-old bartender in east London, said on Tuesday. “I was like: Not again.” Health experts say monkeypox is unlikely to wreak the same kind of havoc as Covid, which has killed millions, infected more than half a billion people, and ravaged the world’s economy.
