How Worried Should I Be About Zika?

Do I need to worry about Zika while traveling for my babymoon in the Caribbean?
—Babymoon enjoyer

I would say the #1 question I got in early 2020 (before COVID) on Instagram/Twitter/Email was about Zika. “Should I have my babymoon in Mexico?” “Can I visit my parents in St. Thomas?” “I might get pregnant in 2023, should I avoid entire swaths of the world until then?” And so on.

Zika is scary. If you remember back to, say, 2016 it was all over the news and the evidence still suggests that Zika infection in pregnancy can cause birth defects.

But: Zika has really, really died down in the last few years. In 2023 there were an estimated 7 cases of traveler-acquired Zika among Americans (that’s not 7 pregnant women, that’s 7 people). This is 7 cases on a base of, perhaps, 20 to 40 million trips. Whether you choose to travel or not is up to you; and the risk isn’t zero. But the chance of Zika infection is, literally, about 1 in a million. Since 2019, there have been no confirmed cases of Zika transmitted in the U.S.