Monkeypox in Portugal

Back on June 1, when I last wrote about Monkeypox in Portugal, there were 119 cases in this country. Fast forward to July 1 and there are 415 cases.

This means that Portugal is currently seeing a doubling of cases every 16 to 17 days. That's a good deal slower than the global doubling rate which is at around 10 days.

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

Portugal, which was hit by the outbreak relatively early, is seeing a slowdown. Assuming that Portugal remains a leading indicator as far as the future trajectory of the disease is concerned, we should see the global doubling rate drop to that of Portugal. With Portugal one month ahead of the pack, we can predict the global total for August 1. Portugal saw a fourfold increase in cases from June to July. The world is therefore likely to see the same from July to August. That would set the global total at around 32,000 on August 1.

Of the roughly 8000 cases globally we've had so far, there has been only one death, and that was in Nigeria. That compares to a mortality rate of about 10% during previous outbreaks. It appears from this that the current version of Monkeypox is no more lethal than COVID, and much less transmittable. Even if we get 32,000 cases globally by August, our chances of catching the disease is minuscule.

Portugal has seen only 40 cases per million people, and we have a global mortality rate of about 1 in 10,000. The chances of anyone dying from Monkeypox is in other words one in 250 million. That's hardly anything to panic about, even if 40 people per million end up with ugly blisters that take a week or two to heal.

Monkeypox

By not listed - http://phil.cdc.gov (CDC's Public Health Image Library) Media ID #2329, Public Domain, Link