The overall expert consensus on the monkeypox outbreak right now is that it won't reach any level comparable to COVID-19.
The Atlantic's Rachel Gutman spoke with five experts for their predictions on the possible paths the outbreak could take.
"They would say one thing for certain: Monkeypox is not the next COVID-19," Ms. Gutman wrote in the June 9 piece. "It's simply not transmissible enough to cause infections on the scale of the pandemic, nor does it seem to be a particularly deadly virus."
The CDC had confirmed 45 cases across 15 states and the District of Columbia as of June 9. Globally, more than 1,300 infections have been reported in 31 countries.
While the experts agreed the monkeypox virus isn't comparable to COVID-19, they varied in their predictions on how the current outbreak could evolve.
Three possible paths the monkeypox outbreak could take:
1. Over before we know it: Amesh Adalja, MD, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, predicts U.S. cases will fall to zero within about three months.
"Monkeypox is a containable virus," he told The Atlantic, pointing to the availability of vaccines and a tactic called ring vaccination. This approach — where close contacts of an infected patient are vaccinated — is what halted a 2003 monkeypox outbreak in the U.S. that infected 47 people.
"This works because contact tracing for monkeypox is relatively easy thanks to the physical proximity necessary for its transmission," Ms. Gutman wrote. Monkeypox is also among the rare diseases in which a person can be vaccinated after becoming infected, preventing contagiousness. Dr. Adalja predicts ring vaccination will outpace the spread of monkeypox within a matter of weeks.
2. Minor, sporadic outbreaks: Monkeypox is more common in Central and West Africa because the virus is endemic in local animal populations. If that were to happen in the U.S., from time to time an animal would infect a person, which would trigger a minor outbreak and then fizzle out.
Bhargavi Rao, PhD, an infectious disease expert who worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo at Doctors Without Borders, said these types sporadic outbreaks are "not the sort of thing that overwhelms a community," and compared their effects to modern bird flu, which causes occasional disruption and leads to culling of animals.
3. A syphilis comparison: Jay Varma, MD, population health professor at New York City-based Weill Cornell Medical College, predicts monkeypox will circulate at low levels and stay concentrated in the community of men who have sex with men, similar to syphilis, which affects less than 1 percent of the Americans. However, anyone, regardless of sexual orientation, can catch monkeypox through forms of close contact, such as contact with lesions or sharing clothing. (To read more about how it is spread, click here.)
In the worst-case and least likely scenario, Dr. Varma said monkeypox could become as common as genital herpes.