17,500 Cases of Monkeypox Worldwide

It's July 24, and we're now at about 17,500 cases of Monkeypox worldwide, exactly as I predicted four days ago. This sets the current rate of doubling at 16, which is the rate that proved to be the tipping point for Portugal. Going forward, we're no longer going to see exponential growth.

Portugal sees a steady flow of 10 new cases every day, and since the disease isn't terminal, there must also be 10 cases healed every day. My estimate is that there are less than 100 Portuguese hospitalized for Monkeypox at any given time.

This state of affairs is about to happen worldwide. From looking at the data, the global flow of cases is going to be around 700. This is the number of people that will enter hospitals with Monkeypox every day. It will also be the number of people leaving hospitals every day. If we assume 10 days of hospitalization, there will be 7000 inpatients with Monkeypox globally at any given day going forward.

Looking at the accumulative numbers, we can predict that we will have about 2800 new cases every four days:

• July 24 - 17,500 cases
• July 28 - 20,300 cases
• August 1 - 23,100 cases
• August 5 - 25,900 cases
• August 9 - 28,700 cases
• August 13 - 31,500 cases

This is hardly cause for concern. The vast majority of these cases will already be healed. Only 7000 of them will be active.

Note also that the 32,000 cases on August 1 that I predicted on July 8 is not going to happen before August 13.

Monkeypox is not spreading nearly as quickly as some have feared, yet Tedros has pretty much singlehandedly declared this a global emergency. He has gone against the advise of his own experts. Instead of seeing the disease as rare, relatively harmless, and difficult to spread, the man is convinced that it's so dangerous that WHO needs to get involved.

There appears also to be some confusion over at Wikipedia, which reported 62 deaths due to Monkeypox a few days ago. That number has now been adjusted back down to 5. Some people appear to be determined to make Monkeypox appear much worse than it is. But as long as cooler heads prevail, we'll avoid another round of hysteria related to a relatively harmless virus.

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