15,000 Cases of Monkeypox Worldwide

It's July 20, and we're now at about 15,000 cases of Monkeypox worldwide. This means that we're 1,000 cases short of what I predicted four days ago. This sets the current rate of doubling at 14 days rather than 13 as I predicted.

Experience from Portugal tells us that once we reach a doubling every 16 days, the growth rate slows dramatically. If current projections hold, we'll see this happen worldwide in less than two weeks.

We're getting close to the tipping point, so we can assume a noticeable slowdown going forward. We can therefore make the following predictions as to the number of cases we'll have going forward:

• July 24 - doubling rate at 15 days = 17,500 cases
• July 28 - doubling rate at 16 days = 20,500 cases
• August 1 - doubling rate at 18 days = 23,000 cases

It looks increasingly unlikely that we're going to see 32,000 cases on August 1, as I predicted on July 8. Monkeypox is not spreading nearly as quickly as some have feared.

Interestingly, Wikipedia is now reporting 62 deaths from the disease. That's up from only 3 back at the start of July. The deaths are all in Africa. But we can only wonder as to why this number would go up 20x over a period when number of cases have only gone up by 2x.

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