At least 49 cases have been confirmed. Health officials — who are scrambling to get a handle on the vaccine-preventable outbreak — suspect 200 to 300 people may be infected.

Summary

A measles outbreak in rural West Texas has surged to 49 confirmed cases, mostly among unvaccinated school-age children, with officials suspecting hundreds more unreported infections.

The outbreak is centered in Gaines County, home to a large Mennonite population with low vaccination rates. Despite CDC support, Texas has not requested federal intervention.

The outbreak has now spread to Lubbock, raising wider public health concerns.

Experts warn it could persist for months without increased vaccination efforts, but skepticism toward vaccines remains a significant barrier.

    • sapient [they/them]@infosec.pub
      28·
      6 days ago

      Extremely, iirc. According to wikipedia:

      It is extremely contagious: nine out of ten people who are not immune and share living space with an infected person will be infected.[5] Furthermore, measles’s reproductive number estimates vary beyond the frequently cited range of 12 to 18,[17] with a 2017 review giving a range of 3.7 to 203.3

      For context the reproductive number (average number of unexposed people a carrier will infect) of the most virulent strains of COVID-19 is 3-8. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35262737/ (basic vs effective rate refers to the infectiveness in a naive population vs one which is taking measures and/or has immunity).

      This is also all exponential so small increases in R number have big impacts nya.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
        18·
        5 days ago

        Pretty sure measles is the one where you can catch it by just walking into a room where someone where an infected person was two hours ago.

        Imagine it’s third period trig and you caught measles from the kid who was in first period trig without ever having seen him.

        It’s bad. Afaik measles is the most contagious disease we’ve ever seen.