Obviously you have a point about the different timescales, but the CDC lists 7−14 days as a typical incubation time and a fuller range of 5−21 days. That's fair

Obviously you have a point about the different timescales, but the CDC lists 7−14 days as a typical incubation time and a fuller range of 5−21 days. That's fairly long and nice for cases which are being successfully contact traced, but also generous room for sh*t to happen in cases where the trail is lost. Monkeypox already has observed fomite transmission (i.e. via contaminated materials), but what's more: it is a poxvirus! It's next of kin of an pathogen known to display true airborne transmission. Maybe for now it's not adept enough at infecting humans to manage on small amounts of the finest aerosols or dried out excretion smoke, but how long is that going to last if this (already atypical) strain can manage to build up variance infecting large numbers of people in densely populated areas? HIV is not that difficult to control in theory. You just test everyone, recurringly, and have the infected individuals strictly adhere to measures to prevent spreading the contagion. Problem managed. As we know, in practice that's prohibitively difficult to bring about. Several weeks to symptoms with ability to contaminate shared environments and potential to develop ability for mass transmissions could be a nasty thing to manage in practice too. This is already on several continents and health authorities don't seem all that on top of what could well emerge over the next few weeks, as incubations time out. So I wouldn't be wildly surprised if we can look back in a month or so and say by late May it was already technically a pandemic. But let's hope, of course, that the transmissibility really is fairly low, that the current reach is a quirk of circumstances, and that all the outbreaks can still be contained. Otherwise I guess it's time to urgently draw on prior research in vaccines for the second time in a small number of years.