Feels like January 2020, and the start of Covid.
Possibly, but the major issue with COVID was that it was completely new which meant we had to play catchup with researching and treating it. Monkeypox doesn't have that advantage, already having existed for over 60 years at this point and treatments already being established. While the Smallpox vaccine has been discontinued from current vaccine programs, the vaccine is still produced for many purposes, one of which being the treatment of Monkeypox. So if this outbreak becomes more severe, it'll just be a case of refining that vaccine to be even more effective for Monkeypox if not just...manufacture the Smallpox vaccine, distribute it and call it a day. I would be very surprised if we had extensive lockdowns with this, like we did with COVID.
Furthermore, while similar to COVID as far as I can tell the transmission isn't as severe.
Maintained significantly close contact is required for the spread of Monkeypox via large respiratory droplets (with risk factors including using the same bed or using the same uncleaned utensils as someone with the disease) while COVID is highly transmissible at even a conversational distance from small respiratory droplets (obviously, this could also be just the result of slight differences in the definition of terminology from the two explanations, so take that with a grain of salt until a concrete scientific comparison is made).
Also worth mentioning is that COVID is contagious even during the incubation period, which is not the case with Monkeypox. This obviously means that its spread is going to be reduced due to people being logically more likely to stay home when they're contagious because they're going to be physically ill. Unlike COVID, where obviously a lot of the spread was the result of being contagious when you're still physically fine. It'll still spread, with people still going about their business despite that. But this is still going to reduce the rate at which it spreads, which gives us more time to figure out how severe of an issue it is and come up with effective ways to stop the spread entirely.
It's for these reasons I'm not so sure if a Monkeypox pandemic would be as severe of an issue as the COVID pandemic was. It's existed for decades, treatments are already established and it's not gonna spread as easily. Obviously, I could be completely wrong on this and we're only gonna know for definite in the future, but I do think we should be okay. At worst, we might go into lockdowns once until a specific Monkeypox vaccine is manufactured (and even then I don't see that happening due to the lack of a contagious incubation period, so I'd say it's more likely you'll just have to self isolate if you show symptoms). I don't see it being an extensive years long issue like COVID was and still is.
