http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/h...column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
If the numbers go up, the govt, police, and other infrastructure they have will collapse.
People will head for the exits whatever way they can. And those scares we have had in NA will then become reality.
In the worst-case scenario, the two countries could have 21,000 total cases of Ebola by Sept. 30 and 1.4 million cases by Jan. 20 if the disease keeps spreading without effective methods to contain it. These figures take into account the fact that many cases go undetected, and estimate that there are actually 2.5 times as many as reported.
In the best-case model, the epidemic in both countries would be “almost ended” by Jan. 20, the report said. Success would require safe funerals at which no one touches the bodies, and treating 70 percent of patients in settings that reduce the risk of transmission. The report said the proportion of patients now in such settings was about 18 percent in Liberia and 40 percent in Sierra Leone.
Bryan Lewis, an epidemiologist at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech, agreed that the estimates were reasonable, perhaps even a bit low compared with those generated by other models. He said that if some of the latest data from the World Health Organization is plugged into the C.D.C. model, “the very large numbers of estimated cases are, unfortunately, even larger.”
The current official case count is 5,843, including 2,803 deaths, according to the W.H.O.
The C.D.C.’s new projections do not include figures for Guinea, one of the three hardest-hit countries, because case counts there have gone up and down in ways that cannot be reliably modeled.
If the numbers go up, the govt, police, and other infrastructure they have will collapse.
People will head for the exits whatever way they can. And those scares we have had in NA will then become reality.
In the worst-case scenario, the two countries could have 21,000 total cases of Ebola by Sept. 30 and 1.4 million cases by Jan. 20 if the disease keeps spreading without effective methods to contain it. These figures take into account the fact that many cases go undetected, and estimate that there are actually 2.5 times as many as reported.
In the best-case model, the epidemic in both countries would be “almost ended” by Jan. 20, the report said. Success would require safe funerals at which no one touches the bodies, and treating 70 percent of patients in settings that reduce the risk of transmission. The report said the proportion of patients now in such settings was about 18 percent in Liberia and 40 percent in Sierra Leone.
Bryan Lewis, an epidemiologist at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech, agreed that the estimates were reasonable, perhaps even a bit low compared with those generated by other models. He said that if some of the latest data from the World Health Organization is plugged into the C.D.C. model, “the very large numbers of estimated cases are, unfortunately, even larger.”
The current official case count is 5,843, including 2,803 deaths, according to the W.H.O.
The C.D.C.’s new projections do not include figures for Guinea, one of the three hardest-hit countries, because case counts there have gone up and down in ways that cannot be reliably modeled.
