Or is it?

Chickenpox was a pre-pandemic problem. Now, we’ve officially leveled up to pox of the monkey variety. That’s right … monkeypox is here, people.

A monkeypox outbreak, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention due to a combination of pandemic fatigue and, well, pretty much just pandemic fatigue, is officially underway in the U.S.

I know … just what you wanted to hear after doing your best to stay a step ahead of Covid-19 for the last two-plus years.

It’s true, though. Just yesterday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency due to a monkeypox outbreak in his state. As if the wildfires weren’t enough, now the Golden State has another outbreak to battle.

California isn’t even the first state to make such a declaration. After health authorities confirmed the first case in Boston back in May, the U.S. has reported almost 6,000 more in the last month or so. Monkeypox has been detected in 48 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico so far, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Illinois, dealing with an outbreak of its own, also announced a public health emergency on Monday while New York, which has nearly 1,400 confirmed cases as of the beginning of this month, declared a state of disaster late Friday.

It’s not just the U.S., either. Monkeypox cases have been reported in 78 countries, according to World Health Organization data. As for the WHO, it made a declaration of its own last month: Monkeypox is a global health emergency.

The stock market didn’t handle Covid-19 well

Markets all over the world crashed when the headlines swirling around Covid-19 started to turn from concerning to straight-up scary. A study by Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management highlights the stock market’s unprecedented reaction to Covid-19.

Investors in the U.S. lost their minds. The 10 trading days after the reality of Covid-19 sank in were more volatile than all but 20 days over the course of the last 120 years. Yes, years. Volatility was worse during the Great Crash of October and November of 1929 and 1987’s Black Monday, when it was as bad as it’s ever been.

Will monkeypox wreak havoc on the market as well?

As market participants, the pandemic’s made all of us a little skeptical of almost every investible company out there. Valuations soared as lockdowns and stimulus checks gave investors plenty of two things: Time and money.

The time made everyone an expert because they were sitting at home reading and researching stocks and options strategies all day. The money, obviously, funded all the purchases. Market caps soared and, as we’ve seen over the first half of this year, things got way, way out of whack.

So, could monkeypox create a similar situation for stocks? In short: probably not.

For starters, it’s unlikely monkeypox will be as widespread a problem as Covid-19 proved to be. Intercontinental travel will continue and business, as usual, the new usual, will continue. Here’s why:

1. Monkeypox is a known virus. It’s been around the block once or twice and there’s already an effective vaccine against it. Those vaccines aren’t readily available, which is the main reason California declared a state of emergency, but they exist. Covid-19 was a novel virus when it first broke onto the scene, meaning scientists initially had no idea where it came from, how it spread, and what it was capable of doing to those unfortunate enough to catch it.

2. More good news: Monkeypox is harder to spread than Covid-19. It’s primarily transmitted through skin-to-skin contact during sex. In the case of Covid-19, for a while at least, it felt like you could get the disease just by looking at someone wrong. Just being in the same building as someone was a risk, even if on opposite sides of it. That’s not true for monkeypox. Aside from sex, it can spread from respiratory droplets when an infected person has lesions in their mouth, but transmission would require prolonged fact-to-face interaction, according to the Center for Disease Control. As a rule, I try to avoid prolonged face-to-face interaction with people with lesions in their mouths, so I should be good. Hopefully, you will manage to avoid it as well.

3. The U.S. is tired of public health emergencies. The Biden administration is considering declaring the monkeypox outbreak just that, according to federal health officials. The last time the U.S. declared a public health emergency was in January 2020 as a direct response to Covid-19. But remember, we didn’t have a vaccine back then. Conversely, the Health and Human Services Department has delivered more than 330,000 doses of the monkeypox vaccine since May. It made another 786,000 doses available to states last week, but some clinics say they still haven’t received enough to meet demand. That’s not typical, though. With Covid-19, that was a Tuesday. The U.S. also has 1.7 million doses of the antiviral treatment tecovirimat in the strategic national stockpile.

You’ll probably hear more and more about monkeypox in the upcoming weeks, but it shouldn’t put the market into a tailspin as Covid-19 did.

Disclaimer: I’m a market participant, not an analyst. This is not financial advice.