Death Rate PSA
I have see a few posts start to pop up on social media saying things like "only 2 deaths" or "only 4 deaths" or "less deadly than Delta". They normally reference a rate of about 0.01% - 0.02% chance of dying, comparing the number of deaths (2-4) to the number of total cases (over 20,000). This is a very false reference. One important reason is that Monkeypox does not kill you the first day you start to show symptoms!
We do NOT know what the death rate for this version of the virus will end up being, and honestly the death rate is quite honestly one of the less scary parts of this disease.
What we do know is that the two old versions of Monkeypox had a death rate of 1% and 10%, as one was considerably more deadly than the other one. Those death rates were in areas of countries in Africa which had very limited health care. So, it is likely the death rate would be much lower with much better health care. I was never able to find a single case where someone flew from Africa, infected with Monkeypox already, into a country in Europe or North America that died of Monkeypox.
One data point I am missing is the average amount of time that someone takes to die after with/from Monkeypox. I do have a note in my old notes (Y2k-2010) that someone dies 4-8 weeks after showing the first symptoms. There is no mention of where I pulled that information from, and when I went out recently to validate it I have been unable to find any research that collaborates that data. However I have found quite a bit of data that says that "mild" cases resolve themselves within about 3 weeks after the first lesion appears. So until I find better data, I have been moving forward with the assumption that if you die with/from Monkeypox it is likely to take at least 4 weeks, and may take up to 8 weeks on average.
So if we take the 5 deaths, and compare them to the number of cases 4 weeks (6627) and 8 weeks ago (988), we get very different death rates than 0.01% - 0.02%. [And yes, I write down the number of total world wide and US cases every morning].
We get a death rate between 0.07% - 0.5% with the amazing full support of a dedicated medical staff focusing on their care.
If the numbers start piling up in the next few weeks, I may make future reference to the death rate in this format -- unless someone finds and posts better data that tells us how long Monkeypox takes to kill someone.