It's July 12, and the global number of Monkeypox cases has just passed 10,000. That's a doubling in cases since June 28, when we passed 5,000.
This may sound like bad news, but the latest number are in fact showing a marked improvement on the situation only four days ago. Back then, we were seeing the number of cases double every 12 days. That has now changed to every 14 days.
If this slowdown in the growth rate persists, we'll have the following doubling rates going forward:
- July 16 - 16 days
- July 20 - 18 days
- July 24 - 20 days
- July 28 - 22 days
- August 1 -24 days
If this pans out, we'll have less than 20,000 cases by July 26, and less than 25,000 cases by August 1. However, even this number may be overly pessimistic, because the rate of spread is dropping off rapidly in countries that were early into the outbreak.
Looking at Portugal as a leading indicator, we see that its rate of doubling which was 16 days on July 1 has improved a lot by July 7. We get this by noting that there were 415 cases on July 1 against 473 cases on July 7. That's a 14% increase over 6 days, which translates to a doubling every 24 days.
If the world follows Portugal's lead we may not even reach 20,000 cases globally by August 1.
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| Monkeypox, cumulative cases, linear plot |
By Edouard Mathieu, Saloni Dattani, Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2022) - "Monkeypox". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/monkeypox [Online Resource] - https://ourworldindata.org/monkeypox, CC BY 4.0, Link
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