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Yale Researcher: 12% Of Liberia's Most Populous County May Have Ebola By December 15
For all the headline fodder surrounding the arrival of Ebola in the US, or any other developed nation for that matter, the key issue surrounding the worst Ebola epidemic in history has little to do with what the virus is doing on the western side of the Atlantic, and everything to do with containing the source of contagion on the eastern side.
It is this issue that a paper in today's edition of The Lancet: Infectious Diseases tackles. It's conclusion:
The number of beds at EVD treatment centres needed to effectively control EVD in Montserrado substantially exceeds the 1700 pledged by the USA to west Africa. Accelerated case ascertainment is needed to maximise effectiveness of expanding the capacity of EVD treatment centres. Distributing protective kits can further augment prevention of EVD, but it is not an adequate stand-alone measure for controlling the outbreak. Our findings highlight the rapidly closing window of opportunity for controlling the outbreak and averting a catastrophic toll of EVD cases and deaths.
The authors do not specify if the catastrophic toll would impact only Africa, but they don't have to: as long as the original epidemic continues unabated and in fact grows larger, the risk of a carrier sliding undetected into any developed nation rises exponentially.
The Yale News summarizes the full paper:
The Ebola virus disease epidemic already devastating swaths of West Africa will likely get far worse in the coming weeks and months unless international commitments are significantly and immediately increased, new research led by Yale researchers predicts.
The findings are published in the Oct. 24 issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
A team of seven scientists from Yale’s Schools of Public Health and Medicine and the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare in Liberia developed a mathematical transmission model of the viral disease and applied it to Liberia’s most populous county, Montserrado, an area already hard hit. The researchers determined that tens of thousands of new Ebola cases — and deaths — are likely by Dec. 15 if the epidemic continues on its present course.
“Our predictions highlight the rapidly closing window of opportunity for controlling the outbreak and averting a catastrophic toll of new Ebola cases and deaths in the coming months,” said Alison Galvani, professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health and the paper’s senior author. “Although we might still be within the midst of what will ultimately be viewed as the early phase of the current outbreak, the possibility of averting calamitous repercussions from an initially delayed and insufficient response is quickly eroding.”
The model developed by Galvani and colleagues projects as many as 170,996 total reported and unreported cases of the disease, representing 12% of the overall population of some 1.38 million people, and 90,122 deaths in Montserrado alone by Dec. 15. Of these, the authors estimate 42,669 cases and 27,175 deaths will have been reported by that time.
Much of this suffering — some 97,940 cases of the disease — could be averted if the international community steps up control measures immediately, starting Oct. 31, the model predicts. This would require additional Ebola treatment center beds, a fivefold increase in the speed with which cases are detected, and allocation of protective kits to households of patients awaiting treatment center admission. The study predicts that, at best, just over half as many cases (53,957) can be averted if the interventions are delayed to Nov. 15. Had all of these measures been in place by Oct. 15, the model calculates that 137,432 cases in Montserrado could have been avoided.
There have been approximately 9,000 reported cases and 4,500 deaths from the disease in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea since the latest outbreak began with a case in a toddler in rural Guinea in December 2013. For the first time cases have been confirmed among health-care workers treating patients in the United States and parts of Europe.
“The current global health strategy is woefully inadequate to stop the current volatile Ebola epidemic,” co-author Dr. Frederick Altice, professor of internal medicine and public health added. “At a minimum, capable logisticians are needed to construct a sufficient number of Ebola treatment units in order to avoid the unnecessary deaths of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people.”
Other authors include lead author Joseph Lewnard, Martial L. Ndeffo Mbah, Jorge A. Alfaro-Murillo, Luke Bawo, and Tolbert G. Nyenswah.
The National Institutes of Health funded the study.
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Swine Flu Hoax redux?
http://www.hourofthetime.com/wordpresstest/
http://healthimpactnews.com/2014/similarities-between-1976-swine-flu-hoa...
It's only 7 grand per person to fly to Liberia right now.
coming to a neighborhood near you...
We need more flights opened up here so we can "save um here".
How come everybody over there is getting this and nobody here?
Ethnic bio-weapons?
How is it that all of the US cases, so far except for Duncan, have been cured here? I thought it was incurable. All of the cases falling in the 30% non-fatal range?
Fuck Yale. The university that produced George Bush and John Kerry. Fuck Yale.
"How is it that all of the US cases, so far except for Duncan, have been cured here? I thought it was incurable. All of the cases falling in the 30% non-fatal range?"
Your odds improve if the government provides $500k worth of "free" medical care, a bed in an intensive care unit, and a team of 50 doctors and nurses pumping 10 liters a day of replacement fluids into you.
Now, we just need to duplicate that effort there with the current 10,000 active cases. What's another $5billion. Double that in 3 weeks, etc, etc
Ctrl-P.
Obongo should send the fatfuck to help the brothers.
well, aparently your thinking it was incurable WAS COMPLETELY WRONG - my lord a self confessing imbecile.
Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola haemorrhagic fever, is a severe, often fatal illness in humans. The average EVD case fatality rate is around 50%. Case fatality rates have varied from 25% to 90% in past outbreaks.Early supportive care with rehydration, symptomatic treatment improves survival. There is as yet no licensed treatment proven to neutralise the virus but a range of blood, immunological and drug therapies are under development.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs103/en/
Must suck to be Liberian.
There is no cure, you stupid chimp. The immune system has to be able to create antibodies to fight off the virus. Better medical care gives the body the strength to do that.
these cases are cured in 48 hours, its somewhat amazing is it not
Amazing...or maybe not. Pretty sure this is something wicked that's been created. Nothing about this "outbreak" makes sense.
Nothing.
And fuck the bus they rolled in on too.
Master of Universe: I laughed up 2 fucking beers reading your stuff. You owe me two cheap shitty beers ya witty cunt.
Those Yale and Harvard perverts are at it again. Hey wait a minute got 3 of them as my professors. I'll get them thinking straight. I'm chicken though because one asked the class if anyone knew what neoliberalism was and I was nodding my head and then quickly started shaking it no when he was about to call on me.. It was a close one. Class almost almost got to hear That's when Yellen goes up your FAFSA and Obama is somewhere outside of the White House and so on. Close call there.
A neoliberal is an individual that has perfected the backstroke in the public trough at the expense of taxpayers that work for a living. A neoliberal has never worked a real day of work in their entire lives and they most likely get two months paid vacation during the summer months so they don't break out into a sweat. Neoliberals are most likely to be chronic abusers of alcohol and they are most likely to be cheating on their tax returns. They typically buy lots of reading material, but they watch TV and read yellow journalism instead of the books they buy for their libraries so they can appear to look like a contemporary intellectual at home and at work. They wear cheap suits, and jeans made in the third world, running shoes made in the third world, and a car made in Germany or Japan. They have 2.5 kids and they are typically on their second common law hubby/wife. They are in-DEBT with either a dog or a cat for company New Years Eve. They can't sing or dance and they listen to the MSM newscast every night at 11:00pm.
And they believe in the Chicago school of economics because that's the ticket into Yale, and Harvard, where all the rest of the anal retentive neoliberals go to school to learn how to steal money from the taxpaying suckers we like to refer to as John Q. Public.
I concur. Yale faggots. And keep your back to the wall at Columbia U and especially Union Theological Seminary - they don't call it Semenary for nuttin.
No poverty exploitation where possible by their rulers lack of hygiene and superstition and bush meat.
Is there a Sandals?
I'm pretty sure that everything over there involves sandals. And it's all inclusive.
Rand: Sandal underwear??????
Slave...you're a Joker! I love such stuff!
Ebola eschmola....Honey Boo Boo got cancelled! Priorities people!!
Have we found a better train wreck? Or is something seriously wrong here?
"redux" is always a sign of intelligence. Sexus, Plexus or Nexus are signs of Henry Miller.
my co-worker's sister makes $72 /hr on the computer . She has been unemployed for eight months but last month her check was $12806 just working on the computer for a few hours. check this... www.yelptrade.com
So much for Sliding Liberia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S4AOJ6MvIo
"Yale Researcher"? Another Bolshevik Shill spreading it's intellectual virus.
I guess that means it should burn itself out in 6 months when the entire country dies. Typical American says, "Whew, thank god this won't get serious!"
Typical American civil servant bureaucrat insists, "Can't catch it on a bus," while typical non-American countries ban flights from contagious countries.
What I worry about is can you catch it in a limo?
you can catch pretty much anything in a limo these days
Typical American talks shit about other Americans while refusing to go over there to help the sick
I guess the white people need to do what their priests and the joos tell them to do, and go over there and try to save all of them.
Is Israel putting any boots on the ground over there to help out? Besides the US troops, I mean.
Plenty of Israeli carpetbaggers running around West Africa, trust me.
More trailer trash chiming in...
Thanks for identifying yourself...
Send the neo-cons. They love spreading death in shit hole countries.
Walking Brain Dead progressives are the new war mongering neo-cons. Can smell 'em before you see them on TV.
Both teams are equal when it comes to a bloodthirst for brown and tan people.
I like that, send shitholes to shitholes. Nice.
The 0bama-cons have been doing a fine job of spreading death and misery around the world in shit hole countries.
As contageous as it is, why isn't ebola running rampant in overpopulated third-world shitholes by now? Think slums in India. I don't understand why outbreaks aren't showing up in more places, given the globally mobile world we live in today.
Me too! Hows about amongst any of the millions of people went on the Hajj? Huh? Bazillions of the little rag-heads! And none of 'em gettin' sick, if it be Allah's will.
According to the stories out of Turkey this is not true.
"As contageous as it is, why isn't ebola running rampant in overpopulated third-world shitholes by now? Think slums in India. I don't understand why outbreaks aren't showing up in more places, given the globally mobile world we live in today."
If asked to name 10 countries on the planet I'd least like to travel to....I'm thinking Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone would have made the list for ...oohhh.....the last 40 years.
Odds aren't high that the majority of the residents will be jetting here for a vacation, either.
Many multi-nationals have banned business travel to the affected areas .... they didn't get the 'all is well' memo. That leaves medical workers and the (tiny) minority of the population that can afford to travel as the remaining risk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Liberia
"Liberia is one of the poorest countries in the world, and its economy is extremely underdeveloped. The First Liberian Civil War in 1989-96 destroyed much of Liberia's economy, especially the infrastructure in and around Monrovia. Many fled the country, taking capital and expertise with them. Some returned during 1997, but many have not."
80% of the population below the poverty line. GDP per capita.....$700.
The reason the outbreak is 'smaller scale' than the media has hyped it up to be is because the basic reproduction number is low relative to influenza or other viral outbreaks like Norovirus (Ebola ~= 1.84), and because of the relatively long generation (aka doubling) time (of ~16 days) and serial interval of Ebola. A global Ebola pandemic 'time scale' shows up on an 18 month to 36+ month timeline in our simulations, as well as some simulations from other researchers. That doesn't mean a negative outcome is a certainty at all -- just that if a pandemic-like outcome were to occur, it starts slowly. . . Even our 'worst-case' simulations for a US Ebola pandemic don't show a peak in incidence for about 270 to 435 days or so post-introduction. And even that model also assumes that health infrastructure in the US becomes slammed ( 'saturated' ) and can no longer respond to new case with contact tracing.
A simple way to model this yourself is to use an exponential population doubling-equation with a generation time that's curve fit to the WHO data from June through September. This results in an outbreak generation (doubling) time of about 14-18 days or so, depending on how you do the curve fitting. The following equation is only valid if things continue on the present course, and control interventions fail.
You can use the equation of the form f(t) = I0 * e ^ [ (ln (2) / G) * t] ... where:
I0: Initial Population Infected on Day t=0
e: Mathematical Constant, The Base of Natural Logarithm (2.718...)
G: Generation Time (aka. Doubling Time in Days)
t: Independent Variable of your function in Days. Same as x in f(x).
An example model using generation time of about 17 days would be f(t) = 3100 * e ^ [ (ln (2) / 17) * t] ...
In this equation, t=0 would represent about September 1st, 2014. Each integer step (+1) in t is one day further from Sep 1st 2014. This equation would have a Generation (doubling) time of 17 days.
This equation would only model the outbreak very roughly (in a worst-case outcome), and would only be valid when the number of Susceptibles are much greater than the number Infected (the exponential phase of an outbreak, aka the first third or so). To get a more accurate result, you need to use a compartment model with differential equations... But a population doubling equation offers a good rough approximation of how things begin and how long they take in a worst-case scenario.
To actually experimentally derive the Generation time in the equation above, you can take the above population doubling equation and do a least-squares regression to curve-fit the parameters G and I0 to the WHO data from June to September (prior to the widespread problem of underreporting). You can use a site like http://zunzun.com/ which will do least-squares regression for you. You would use the "Exponential 2D" function here : http://zunzun.com/Equation/2/Exponential/Exponential/ . I did this last month and derived a curve-fit Generation time of somewhere between 14 and 21 days if memory serves me correctly.
So there are a couple of possibilities for 'why is this not bigger than it seems yet'... one is that this is localized to the poor state of infrastructure in W Africa, and the basic reproduction number is lower in other countries due to better infrastructure. An example of this former possibility was the failure of the disease to take hold in Nigeria (due to rapid contact tracing and better infrastructure). A more likely explanation (just a personal opinion, not a fact) is that simply that we are early into the time-scale of the Ebola outbreak. That is good news in a sense, because is means there is still be an opportunity to put a lid on this whole thing.
However, if the disease gets into slums in India, Lagos / Nigeria, or Cairo, etc and other emerging countries with mega-cities, then there could be a problematic situation because contact-tracing could become impossible. The focus of the media on the US is actually a mistake... What determines what happens is actually going to be in third-world slums inside and outside Africa.
We have a wide span of outcomes at this point... A positive outcome could be as small as a minor problem that is resolved in Q1 2015 with no spread outside W Africa, to negative outcome (pandemic) that's a major problem that spans the globe over several years. We won't really know 'for sure' which way things our headed until early Q1 2015, because the datasets are of poor quality at the moment, and WHO is not releasing reliable numbers anymore (the WHO numbers are about a 2.5x underestimate according to WHO themselves, but we have no idea of the actual reality at the moment).
Hope this helps people analyze and come to their own conclusions about risks or lack thereof.
- admin .at. operonlabs.com :: http://operonlabs.com
IT doesn't help. And no one comes to their own conclusions dimwit - they watch TV only. You really need to get out or something. But when you say "logarithm" it kinda gives me a hardon.
Of course most people watch TV only. But I expect a higher IQ in the ZH crowd.
If you need help, there is a good tutorial here. https://www.khanacademy.org/math/algebra2/logarithms-tutorial
And our loyal ally Turkey is the most reliable source of truth I can think of too!
RUmsfeld was only right about one thing. "NUKE THE CUBE!" but no one listened.
Its a question of vectors. There really isn't a lot of non intimate human to human contact over there. "Still tribal."
Not true here in the West though. We have public transportation, the interstate highway system, interstate trucking, a hell of a lot of organized trash collection and the millions of birds (mainly seagulls) to go along with it.
Could be a hoax (see below)...but are you willing to take that risk?
Harvard University has already said "no phucking way.". Not true of Yale apparently...
This explanation is tremendous where did you go to school? Shithole for fucking morons High or what? Was is interesting is its not clear you said anything despite somehow believing you did. Great work.
I have always thought all things vectoral are questions of vectors whether they be animal vectors
or just plane geometric vectors transcending planes and points but not quite objects
vectors pointing nowhere or somewhere or other. Definitely a matter of vectors.
Interesting and clearly very very sophisto view of "tribal" but I don't even know where to start staring at your black hole of ignorance...
Its a germ dude. It doesn't run.
Its such a globally mobile world
from my immobile ass in front of my shit spewing TV
on my mobile phone believing
in a globally mobile world...ta ti da di do di dey.
I think its a globally mobile world
cause they tell me its a mobile world
globally moving mobile world
spinning orbiting mobile world...ta ti da di do di dey.
Get a globe. Locate the equator. Locate the countries where all the ebola infections have occurred now and in the past. Now you understand why Ebola is a tropical virus requiring very specific environmental conditions (year round near constant temperature and humidity) to survive in its animal reservoirs which also require very specific conditions. Tropical diseases and infections don't survive and/or evolve in temperate environments which are either too dry (too high an elevation, too far from the equator) or have a large seasonal temperature variation. Now aren't you glad you live in North America? (This also applies to malaria etc)
Malaria was common in the southern U.S. until the 1950's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Malaria_Eradication_Program
Malaria was epidemic in the corn belt until they drained the tall grass prairie.
Even the Indians wouldn't go in there.
Fundamental principle until the recent endemic of political correctness was that one built high, strong, and long fences. Why? Because things change. An interviewed doc recently noted that the virus "load" is increasing meaning it is becoming more communicable. The mayor of New York is a communist whose profile looks Exactly like Obomao's (ha!) a former community organizer (hmmmm) who is now calling for 200 foot apartments to pack more people into the Blade Runner NY city. NY is now 50% foreigners with all there diseases, failure to assimilate, and social demands.
The single most ignored question in the US is where does all that human waste go? There is this little thing called carrying capacity...at a certain point, like Houston, we drink our own recycled and "cleaned" pee water. At least we drink it until some yokel with a hangover doesn't push the buttons just right and then we die from it. The fundamentl principle for America is EASY: Stop all immigration; we are beyond our carrying capacity. California has not water. if the "natural" birth increases had been allowed California would only have 20 million people instead of being a cesspool of 40 MILLION foreigners with no allegiance to the US. As it currently looks, Mexico is taking southern California and China NOrthern California. More than 50% of San Francisco residents are Chinese; these are New Chinese residents not native born Chinese Americans. Can you say treason? Not one WWII vet died for the liberals to give this country away.
... malaira indeed is a tropical problem, but it was in colonial days found in North America as far as the Great Lakes...
I'm calling hoax.
All I believe is in the bloody soaked body of some hippie jew killed by other jews from a book of dubious and spurious heritage.
Gibberish pure gibberish.
The numbers in this article and the WHO's reported numbers aint jiving...
Somebody is bullshitting...
My guess is these guys are closer to the truth. soon they are going to have to triple the reported rates... imagine the required diversion needed to slip this one in...
May as well get some of that brown acid now... thats where this shit is headed...
Start with WHO apparently can't count, known in the media as "undercounts."
Inside sources at WHO said "You know we count in the dark and..."
6000 people for the entire African cntinent is a drop in the ocean. The true population of Africa is not known but it is very large. Nigeria alone is 3 times the size of Texas and has 200 unique languages.
I am afraid none of these dead Africans would agree with the irrelevance you statistically assign them Himmler.
The point was, the PTB arbitrarily pick which human ailment that want to address. 10x that many people died of hunger related ailments in the same period. You don't see the military swooping in to give them our excess food that will simply rot, do you?
Abandon all hope, ye who are about to enter here...
finish it dude...From The Death Ship - B. Traven...did you work at Lasser Marshal by any chance...they had that over the door?
Around 300 adults per 1000 will die from all causes in Mali this year (it appears on the stats as one of the shittiest shitholes on the whole planet)
Life is cheap, short and shit in most of West Africa for most West Africans.
Ebola is probably the least of the average persons concerns.
It's a bit ironic that average yuppie Westerners have only paid attention the plight of Africa when it concerns their own lives... only when some exotic disease arrives on our doorstep (like HIV) does anyone seem to care about Africa. . . And even today, Africans do not have the same level of access to HIV drugs as we do in the US.
You're correct -- malaria, cholera, typhoid and tons of other diseases kill needlessly in the third-world. Yet we never hear about these as 'pressing concerns' in the Western Media. There are treatments for such diseases, yet so many die. Luckily , there are some researchers with moral compasses in the US working on affordable new treatments for Malaria ... but the Western model in the pharmaceutical industry is seriously flawed (and their drug pipeline has dried up). Innovation of new drugs is not at the same pace of breakthroughs in the past, and any new drugs are priced at the stratosphere -- out of reach of many of the people that need them to survive. A good example is Gilead's Hep C drug Sovaldi, which runs a price of about $1000 per day. Who in Africa can afford this?
However, Ebola is a unique situation in many respects . . . a sort of exception at the moment. That is because there is a potential -- owever small the risk -- that Ebola becomes and epidemic or pandemic. This was never the case for H1N1 'swine flu', as this virus was overhyped and simply did not have the intrinsic virulence that it claimed to possess... It did not have the molecular properties of a pandemic enabled virus. Unfortunately, Ebola does possess such properties... Although this does not make an Ebola outcome certain by any stretch. It's just that we are currently in uncharted waters, and the risk of 'unknown unknowns' is high.
Ebola is a threat (of uncertain risk, high impact) is because of the geometric (exponential) spread of the disease so far ... And because, to date, none of the 'traditional' interventions that worked in the past have slowed this exponential progression (despite the boundless optimism of Frieden). Cases are doubling every 16 days or so.
At the moment, in terms of overall third-world deaths from disease, Ebola is a drop in the bucket. However, unlike cholera for example, it's impossible for the 21st century world to have a 'cholera' pandemic. The same goes for malaria. Really the only comparable pathogens to Ebola are Zoonotic diseases like Avian Influenza. The issue here is one of progression and one of scale. Avian Influenza has never infected more than a handful of individuals, in small outbreaks directly seeded from zoonotic reservoirs. There has never been really sustained human-to-human transmission of a novel zoonotic pathogen with such a high mortality rate as Ebola in recent history. Certainly nothing like 10,000 official cases, which may in reality be has high as 20,000 to 25,000.
The big issue is that zoonotic pathogens, when they jump species, are so 'novel' to the human immune system that they often have high intrinsic virulence and high case fatality rates (Hantavirus, Ebola, Avian Flu, etc). On the other hand, zoonotic pathogens often have a poor ability to transmit, so they almost never turn out to be a significant problem. The last time a zoonotic pathogen became a pandemic was in 1918 with the 'Spanish Flu', and even in that instance there exist a wide variety of theories for its origination.
With Ebola, a major problem is simply the number of people infected and the area of the world they are infected in. . . It's difficult to distinguish Ebola from Malaria or Typhoid without blood antigen tests (or blood smear w/ Giemsa staining for Malaria, etc), and West African countries don't have the infrastructure to differentiate Ebola cases from Malaria or Typhoid Fever etc.
I agree with the sentiment that , in general, West Africans previously (and probably continue) to have bigger concerns than Ebola. But the problem is the potential (however remote) for a geometric spread of Ebola Virus Disease. This would not only impact all of Africa, but the entire world. Left unchecked, eventually this will be a major concern for everyone. This does not , however, justify the media's completely unscientific presentation of the story, the hype, or the general level of scientific ignorance in the media. Their coverage of what's going on with Ebola has been an abject failure to properly inform the public. They have not presented the public with good information.
What we need to do is have real objective scientific discussions, and real leadership about what to do. We need less beauracrats and politicians, and more scientists involved. This means no 'ulterior motives' in terms of going over to Africa to 'nation build' or interfere with internal politics using Ebola as an excuse for geopolitical chess or pharmaceutical price-gouging. We need to simply have a scientific discussions of the risks and the appropriate and ethical ways to respond.
Of course, the same should go for other issues such as Malaria & Typhoid (major third-world disease), as well as multi-drug resistant bugs in the first-world like MRSA/VRSA. But one thing at a time I suppose, and we need to prioritize and seperate what are real threats from overreactions.
Regardless: We should not be distinguishing between the value of a human life in the third world vs first world for any disease -- Ebola or otherwise.
You cannot have it "both ways" as the saying goes. If America is to provide "support" for the world's problems then a much greater American "imperialism" has to be supported. It is stupid to decry America's use of raw materials as being more than our "purported" allowed amount (although just who determines these allotments is odd; communist liberals probably, since all liberals are de facto communists).
Liberia's president Ellen Sirleaf attended George Soro's wedding last year. So instead of crying to the US and US taxpaying companies why doesn't Soros take care of the Liberian problems (taxes are really just the fees, levies and taxes from companies since the US taxpayer is just a sham to keep everyone fearful, at least for the 50% who Pay taxes).
Liberia and these other African countries are being strip mined by Soros and the other communists, which is why China has a huge presence in Africa. The "value" of a human life arises from the group determination; communists like Mao educided (like genocide but the elimination of those who can think or speak critically) anyone who disagreed with the communists.
To understand this there is no better book than Frank Dikotter's Mao's Great Famine which should be required reading in every college economics, history, and "world view" class in the United States. While another author has tried to rip off his book, Mr. Dikotter's clear-eyed view and impeccable research is not duplicable. He is a brilliant author and it is a disgrace that his book has not sold millions of copies. A disgrace.
Well said.
(book)
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Government-R-J-Rummel/dp/1560009276
It is not just communists that practice genocide (Irish Potatoe Famine), they (those in a position to do so) and their supporters do genocide because they are fucking stupid.
All the evidence shows that a happy, healthy well educated workforce with freedom of thought and action is the most productive and profitable.
Mali has per capita GDP of $1,100 the US $54,000, that is $52,900 of growth potential per person per year just to get them up to US standards of 2013.
All they need is a bit of help setting up on-demand access to clean drinking water and the separation of clean and waste water.
"Ex Africa aliquid novi"
Giant dreams
midget humans
https://www.academia.edu/8945501/Dinosaur_Death_by_Dwarfism
not to mention mental midgets.
Please send us money and we will fix Africa...we promise this time.
The Yale estimate of 42K reported cases by Dec 15 implies a daily new case growth rate of about 2.9% per day for 50 more days on the current base of 10K cases, an amount that is DOUBLE the case/day growth rate reported in the WHO numbers for the last month (YMMV - your math). WHO's last 2 week's reports show on average 3-country 145 new cases per day on a total case average of 9000, or a 1.6% new infection growth rate per day, so how Yale justifies DOUBLING the WHO and the matching national MOH reported numbers is open to question and further investigation (consensus estimates are that the combined reported and unreported daily and total new cases are 2 to 2.5 the 'reported' numbers - so we're just talking 'reported' numbers here).
MOH Ministry of Health daily report numbers from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone have become totally erratic in the last 2 weeks, either from chaos-caused poor data capture availability, or from intentional under-reporting of available numbers, such as WHO has successfully been accomplishing for over one month.
Despite the WHO and the national MOH attempts to understate the reported EVD daily infection totals and growth rates, their manipulated numbers cannot disguise a 3% per day new case infection rate which compounds into African and perhaps worldwide pandemic disaster, of the magnitude Yale is proposing.
I have tried to convey the results and changes from my 60 day daily EVD database, to the 2 'expert' sites FluTrackers and FluBoard, and they have invited me to stop interferring with their sanitized, unspecific, presentation of the 'clean' news flow describing the disciplined CDC-Obama containment of the emerging EVD infection.
See my post above..
This could very well be the rabbit they pull out of their hat..
A pandemic, or st least the threat of one would make a rejected reserve currency or say a 50% reduction in Saudi oil output in a few yrs. seem trivial..
The timing of this does seem suspect...
Many observers believe the 9% stock market collapse last week was an accurate discounting of the business collapse that would have resulted from a continuation of the Ebola events of that week, and that only hollow and false promises by Bullard and other 'tribe-talkers' have enticed buyers back into the market with a resulting short squeeze.
The Ebola 'non-contact' business reaction and collapse may be the crisis that Rahm Emmanuel and his Cook County community disorganizer may not be able to keep from going to waste.
Yah stupendous theory. My speed reading isn't fast enough I skip over this crap. Back to practice.
I have always felt that "many observers" was the most reliable source of information available.
very suspicious indeed in this tiny orderly universe you hint at but fail to express as anything but an innuendo of something that could possibly mean something.
You are correct. Please contact me at admin .at. operonlabs.com if you wish to discuss your calculations further. We are planning on releasing video simulations in Google Earth of both the 'best-case' and 'worst-case' scenarios relatively soon.
everyone and I mean everyone is on the edge of their seats waiting for your contribution to wasted internet energy...
A "Yale Estimate" wow I'm impressed. - VASSAR GIRL.
Reading some of the criticism of that paper, I wonder if they have stopped imparting the wisdom to researchers that it is Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt. The are several grounds on which to criticize the paper, but flogging as dogma- survey data whose authors (WHO) freely admit their data is woefully incorrect, is alarming.
Mankind slowly reasoned its way out of the Dark Ages, without which, none of "this" would be possible (so they say). The path to enlightenment began with questioning the relationship of God and Reality. Many centuries later search for reason has come full circle. The Idiocracy of the Church of the Holy PhD, where "Science" is God and the congregation mindlessly preaches, much less debates, the objective reality of that which it is no longer capable of comprehending.
Better luck next time humans. Rinse, Repeat.
Human beings can never be underestimated for their ability to be duplicitous, ie, the reporting is "off" in Africa because those who can are paying the morticians to provide them a death certificate so they can bury the body rather than have it taken away for incineration. This may skew the numbers by as much as 20% or more as the families avoid the stigma of ebola.
Do bear in mind that the American General in Liberia Maj. Gen. Darryl Williams has been stupid enough to say that they will watch and determine who is high risk and who is low risk in returning our soldiers from Liberia. Point: Classic Liberal politics of thinking they can "know."
The US has become a country in which you are not allowed to protect yourself. We once believed that the first rule was not that the other person had the right to determine your life, but You had the right to determnine your life meaning to Ensure your own well-being. Now they play with our lives like it's a poker game of political correctness. Nurture muslims at our breast like the serpents they are? Sure, after all, some of them may turn on us and kill us but hey...Let in 1.2 MILLION Liberians, as the US immigration service has done in the last twenty years, sure why not...after all there are only 4.4 MILLION Liberians in Liberia itself so we now have "family reunification" citizenship available for an entire Country since every Liberian here can sponsor others from Liberia.
Odd that the US, Canada, and England have traditionally been Christian and white; with very small numbers compared to non-whites worldwide but the genocide of the culture of the white cultures and the destruction of a white race has now been ensured. Ya think that is a mistake? And if that's racist then why don't we call China racist? Or the Latinos who have No immigration? And of course in Africa they massacred whites and drove them out...
As first observed by other commenters on ZH, the WHO numbers show the rate-of-change of W Africa growth rate is slowing.
After checking this morning, I can also see a discrepency between the most recent WHO numbers and previous numbers (as well as the Yale model)... While the recent WHO numbers still imply an exponential growth curve, the WHO numbers in Liberia now imply generation (doubling) time well in excess of 30 days)...
The data which seeds models that predict the more 'dire' outcomes come from June to mid-September, when the daily case growth rate was in excess of 3.0% per day. A growth rate of 3.0% a day would be consistent with a Generation time of around 23 days.
I think the discrepency between the WHO statistics and the models/previous WHO statistics is directly explained in the recently-reported 'reduction in the rate of acceleration' in the published WHO statistics ... WHO now indicates a daily growth rate of 1% to 2% or so, instead of >3% as they did earlier last month.
The recent reduction in WHO-reported case growth rate could be explained in three ways:
(1) One or both datasets of the WHO numbers are wrong , and/or,
(2) The outbreak growth rate is actually 'slowing' , with Oct having less new cases per day than in Sept measured in percent. (but unfortunately would still imply R-0 > 1). Still, this would be a positive development if correct , or
(3) There is now a significant under-reporting of new cases, which then shows up as a reduction in the rate of increase in the latest WHO statistics (ie. the 'reduction' in growth rate doesn't exist on the ground.). This would be a negative development, if correct.
I don't know which of these three possibilities are the accurate explanation.
My personal opinion is that we are dealing with under-reporting (which per WHO, could be as high as 2.5X), but any of these three explanations above are scientifically plausible. Thanks to everyone here who noticed this important information.
hey! jethro! there is something wrong with this model!
just bang on it a few times, barney! that usually works!
how does brownie get people to hire him? i bet all his lips are flapping all the time.
Please seasonaly adjust this number so it is more appealing to the general sheep.
These numbers from the Lancet study are consistent with the latest Operon Labs West Africa SEIR 'worst-case' model predictions from the 'C3' model series, completed on Wed Oct 22nd 2014.
Operon Labs: West Africa Ebola Model version C3 (incl. Liberia/Guinea/Sierra Leone)Date / I+R+D (Infected+Recovered+Dead) / Total Fatalities
Oct 01 2014 / 7,281/ 3,819
Oct 22 2014 / 22,224 / 14,734
Nov 01 2014 / 34,699 / 22,535
Dec 01 2014 / 125,922 / 84,914
Jan 01 2015 / 425,554 / 291,847
Feb 01 2015 / 1.3 million / 0.9 million
Mar 01 2015 / 3.3 million / 2.4 million
Apr 01 2015 / 6.6 million / 5.3 million
This numbers represent a 'worst-case' scenario (not the most 'probable case' scenario). The Operon 'worst-case' models assume interventions are ineffective, the virus continues to follow transmission dynamics published by NEJM/WHO in Sep 2014. The further out we go on the timeline, the wider the Confidence Interval becomes.
On the positive side, if contact tracing and local interventions are approx 40 to 80% effective in reducing overall transmission, it's possible this outbreak could be brought under control by Q1/Q2 2015. Hopefully, by early next year, we won't ever have to hear about Ebola on CNN ever again.
Additional Data on Operon C3 West Africa 'worst-case' model:
1/sigma (Incubation Period) : 9.4 days (Single-day Exposures, All Countries, Observed)
1/gamma (Infectivity Period): 8.2 days (Derived from Observed Serial Interval (All Countries) - Incubation Period) (17.6 Days - 9.4 Days)=8.2 days
sigma (Incubation Rate) : 1 / 9.4 days = 0.1063830
gamma (Infectivity Rate) : 1 / 8.2 days = 0.12195120f (Case Fatality Rate): 0.708 (NEJM/WHO)
gamma_SIM: Recovery Rate (SIM): (1-f)*Gamma = 0.292*Gamma = 0.03560976
delta_SIM: Mortality Rate (SIM): f*Gamma = 0.708*Gamma = 0.0863414496
R0 (Reproduction Num#) : 1.84 ( Weighted Avg, All Countries)
Beta_sim(Transmission Rate) = R0 * Gamma
Beta_sim(Transmission Rate) = 1.84 * 0.12195120
Beta_sim(Transmission Rate): = 0.224390208
Td_model (Model Doubling Time) = ~16.3 days (Simple calc.. from two points in output..Td=(t2-t1)*(log 2 / log(q2/q1))
Td_actual (Actual Doubling Time) = 15.74 days (Weighted Average, Liberia+SL+Guinea)
Serial Interval (Model Serial Interval) = Not Calculated
Serial Interval (Actual Serial Interval) = 17.6 days (NEJM/WHO. Used to derive the infectious period)
-- admin .at. operonlabs.com :: http://operonlabs.com
CORRECTION: WORST CASE IS EVERYONE DIES dumbass.
A statistician is worth less than a chicken cause you can eat a chicken.
Actually, not everyone dies in worst-case.
First, some will never get the disease because some will never become exposed at all (this depends characteristic population mixing).
Second ... And more importantly (with a bit of reading), you'd realize a big unexplored variable in EVD is genetic susceptibility. There exists research suggests approximately 1% to 15% of the population may be genetically resistant to Ebola infection to various degrees. This is due to a inherited gene associated with Natural Killer Cells (NK Cells) called KIR2DS1 and KIR2DS3. Carriers of these alleles are more likely to die from Ebola (higher CFR).
Furthermore: Those who lack both the KIR2DS1 and KIR2DS3 alleles in their NK cell gene profiles may actually be intrinsically 'resistant' to Ebola -- so much so that that a significant fraction of these people will actually seroconvert (become IgG Ebola-antibody positive) without ever getting sick.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20878400
perhaps we are having a problem with articles "the:" worst case. and actually after trolling here a while this very entertaining waste of human energy my own and I daresay all of yours with a couple of exceptions, I have changed my opinion, THE BEST CASE IS if EVERYONE DIES. DOn't you think. EVERYONE.
in worst-case do we need the hyphen? is it English either way? I understand structuring it this way removes you from the underlying reality in a sort of remote third person that doesn't exist, after all you are a statistician so the underlying reality doesn't concern you, but you see this makes you quite irrelevant regardless of your ability to push numbers, because reducing humans to less than human exposes you are less than human...etc. fuckwit. Actually.
Lancet just makes my skin boil.
You listen to CNN? Meanwhile, the US more Ebola infected people will continue to arrive by plane at this president believes in open borders: http://www.gramsgold.com/news/obama-wont-let-ebola-get-in-the-way-of-his...
You listen to CNN? Meanwhile, the US more Ebola infected people will continue to arrive by plane at this president believes in open borders: http://www.gramsgold.com/news/obama-wont-let-ebola-get-in-the-way-of-his...
A lot of these predictions involve guesstimates worthy of Wall Street and Central Banks. Ebola is running wild but at some point you end up with a large population of 'cured' patients who have some immunity (baring mutations in Ebola). You also eliminate more of those with 'below average intelligence' - leaving survivors who are smarter. I don't dispute the number, and if you had an accurate count you might be close already - but the final number could end up as half or third of their number.
Or double...give or take a few hundred thousand...
double add divide big number small number or zero yah do whatever you want since counting is apparently beyond you.
You also eliminate more of those with 'below average intelligence' - well kiss YOUR ass goodbye motherfucker.
I'm afraid these cured patients will become our overlords myself.
Obama acts like he wants to make Liberia the 51st state, or maybe the 52nd after DC of coarse.
Yah he acts just like that. What trailer did you crawl out of?
59th, after Ukraine.
FRESNO - I've written a little about some of the great military figures Liberia has given the world, like General Butt Naked and his platinum-blonde drag queen psycho killers. But I've never told the hilarious, totally sick story of how Liberia got the way it is. And it's too interesting to hold back any longer.
Liberian history is supposedly "tragic," which is newspaper code for "funny as Hell." I can't help it, it is. It's not like I don't sympathize. I do. I mean, which slum did your grandparents come from? Probably some starved village where the coal mine's been closed since it ate a whole shift of locals. How'd you like it if everybody in your neighborhood took up a collection to send you back there, even if you didn't speak a word of the language? "We feel you don't fit in in Santa Barbara and you'll never be truly happy until you're back in Lower Slobovia:"
That's how Liberia started. It was white people's idea from the start. They were worried about free blacks, who made up about a tenth of the 2 million black people in the US. The two extremes of the slavery issue, abolitionists and crazy slaveowners, agreed something had to be done about all those free blacks.
The abolitionists loved black people so much they wanted them to go far, far away. So did the slaveowners, who announced with no evidence at all that free blacks were "promoters of mischief." (I don't know what "mischief" means--maybe they TP'd those Gone With the Wind plantation houses.)
A group of rich white do-gooders including Francis Scott Key, who wrote "the Star Spangled Banner," got together to raise the money to send free blacks back to Africa. For them Key had a special version of the anthem: "Oh say can you see/the home of the brave? If so, you're standing too close/Go about 4000 miles southeast, to West Africaaaa."
Congress came through with a big grant and in 1819, a ship with 88 freed blacks and three white chaperons landed in that other success-story for re-planting blacks, Sierra Leone. After gassing up at Freetown, they headed down the coast to the promised land, Liberia.
Within three weeks of arriving at their new home, all three whites and 22 blacks died of fever. That's barely time to start naming things "free-" this and "free-that.
Instead they named the place "Perseverance." A little truth in advertising. The rich whites sitting home safe in the US were determined to persevere in Liberia, even if it meant shipping every black they could catch straight into the most disease-ridden, lethal climate in the world. They worked a deal with the US Navy that any slave ships intercepted on the high seas would be detoured to Liberia an dump their cargo there, which meant that no matter how many colonists died, more were always on the way.
It was like a do-gooder version of Darwin, only sped up. Most of the newcomers died so fast they barely had time to thank their benefactors, but a few survived. And they were the ones who married and had kids, so eventually you got a population that had some degree of resistance to all the tropical diseases.
Once they realized they weren't all going to die in the next week, the settlers went to work on the most fundamental thing in any society: setting up cliques. There were three big ones in Liberia: the freed slaves who were "black"; the ones who were "mulatto"; and way back there in the bush, the natives. Naturally, none of these cliques liked each other.
The next step, naturally, was sucking up to the people who abused you. Is this starting to remind you of high school? That's because high school is a totally typical example of how people act when they have to start a society from scratch.
So instead of making peace with the natives, the Liberians spent the 1840s trying to get officially recognized by the whites. The funny bit is that the European states didn't have too much problem granting it, but the US--the country that started Liberia with a huge grant from Congress--refused to recognize Liberia until 1862. Guess why. Yup: because the South might object to having a black ambassador in Washington D.C.
It makes you wonder how they finally agreed to recognize Liberia. I mean, it's 1862, the Confederacy's at war with the US, and some bureaucrat's still sweating over the decision: "Well, Mr. Lincoln, our focus groups show there might be a negative reaction in some of the border districts:"
By this time Liberia was a full-grown country, doing what West African coastal enclaves are supposed to do: getting ripped off in "development" loans from the West, having ridiculous border disputes over some fever-ridden chunk of bush, and making the inland natives feel like dirt. British banks ripped the Liberians off so badly that one Liberian president--"the Liberian Lincoln," no less--had to swim for his life, and ended up as shark food before he made it to a British ship in the harbor of Monrovia, the new Liberian capital city.
Monrovia was named after James Monroe, who was one of the supporters of the Liberian colonization plan. His famous comment on Liberia was, "Love you guys, wish you could stay longer, here's your hat."
My favorite border dispute was between Liberia and that other outpost of freedom, Sierra Leone. In 1883, Sierra Leone claimed territory that Liberia held. The British backed up the Sierra Leoneans; Uncle Sam decided to stay out of it, and the Liberians had to back down. Next it was the French, in the Ivory Coast next door, grabbing another chunk of territory. Through it all Uncle Sam kept his distance from his black nephews in Liberia. It was like he was a little embarrassed by them.
One reason the US might've been embarrassed by the Liberians is that they kept trying to look white. And they succeeded. Take a look at the pictures of Liberian leaders from the 1800s and they look like Confederate generals with a tan--a lot of white blood in there. The Liberians were proud of that; the US wasn't.
These "Americo-Liberians" were never more than five percent of the population, but they ran the coast, had the money, understood more about the outside world--so they considered themselves the elite. They felt even whiter when they compared themselves with the natives, who were pure West African--some of the darkest people in the world. To remind everybody of the difference, the settlers called themselves "Americo-Liberians" and put on a lot of airs, with stiff collars and muttonchop sideburns--not to mention that other mark of higher civilization, land grabs.
Nobody was really sure how far inland Liberia's borders went. Basically, it was as much as they wanted or could grab. Nobody worried much about the natives; they were black and uncivilized. The Americo-Liberians were as racist as the slaveowners their ancestors had crossed the ocean to get away from. They sent their kids to school in the US to make sure they didn't get too African, and didn't even try to find out who lived in the jungle they'd claimed until the 1860s.
By the 1890s, you had the ultimate in, uh, black comedy: Liberian gunboats sailing upriver to bombard savage native tribes who were resisting civilization. In fact, they were resisting it too well: when the Americo-Liberian army marched inland to teach the Gola tribe a lesson, they got their cafe-au-lait asses kicked.
Liberian military history recovered its former glory in 1917, when Liberia formally joined the Allies against the Germans. There was panic among the General Staff in Berlin when the news arrived. But there was rejoicing in Monrovia, because it meant all German assets in Liberia could be seized and handed out to deserving Americo-Liberian pals.
But then unrest flared up inland, in darkest Liberia. The Americo-Liberian government sent a party to investigate. It turned out the tribes back there had heard a rumor that slavery was going to be abolished, and were outraged. The government explained it was just PR, a decree to impress the foreigners. But the natives were still restless, so the government had to send a big force to convince the Kru, the biggest tribe, to be peaceful by sacking their towns and killing off their warriors.
World War II was Liberia's golden age--by Liberian standards, that is. Once again the country took its stand for liberty, enlisting on the Allied side. But this time that actually meant something, because while WW I was basically a European war, WW II really was a worldwide deal. So the US set up some bases on the Liberian coast, with plenty of trickle-down for the locals. All kinds of fancy Western ideas started percolating through Monrovia. Women got the vote and in the early Sixties the Peace Corps did some of its earliest do-gooding in Liberia.
What did those kids actually do in the Corps, anyway? As far as I know, they just hugged a lot of dark-skinned people and meant well. It's kind of fun to think of these white American hippies' welcoming party in Monrovia, with all the snooty mulattoes in town sipping cocktails and warning them about those terribly, terribly primitive blacks one meets inland.
Liberia's biggest break ever came when some genius realized that since Liberia was officially a country--recognized since 1862, remember!--it had the right to sell ship registrations. Which it started doing, cut-rate, to every tramp steamer that didn't want to bother with lifeboats or safety inspections.
Which is why, every time an oil tanker goes aground while the captain was dead drunk, or comes apart mid-ocean, the papers call it "a Liberian-registered vessel." Your assurance of quality on the high seas.
That one's still a big money-spinner for Liberia. Actually Liberia was doing OK, by African standards, right up to the 70s. They'd had the same president from 1944 to 1971, an upstanding old guy with the great name of William Vacanarach Shadrach Tubman. With his suit and horn-rimmed glasses, he looks a little like Papa Doc Duvalier, the scary little dude who ruled Hatii at about the same time. But Tubman was a much more peaceful guy, who actually tried to include the inland tribes in the party. Investment picked up, schools got built, peace almost looked ready to break out. Almost.
Screenshot, click to enlarge (30 Kb)
When Tubman died another fairly decent guy, William Tolbert, was elected President. Tolbert tried to move with the times, dressing up in those African clothes--little white cap, white leisure suit--that make you look like a hospital orderly on break and carrying one of those sticks of office like Mobutu had in Congo.
But he didn't move fast enough. In 1980 he and a dozen of his officials were killed in a coup. This is the moment when Liberia starts its big, long fall.
Turned out the coup was run by Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe. Doe was the first of the monsters. Since him, it's been one long string of monsters calling the shots in Liberia.
Doe started the tradition of killing anybody who objected to his decisions and stealing everything he could grab. But he was a weak-kneed moderate, compared to the next generation of Liberian wackos. You get this pattern a lot in the Third World: the first army officer to stage a coup is just an ordinary murderer, but somehow when he overthrows the old-style civilian politicians, all bets are off, and the contenders just get crazier and more violent all the time.
In 1989, an Americo-Liberian named Charles Taylor showed up in charge of a guerrilla army calling itself the National Patriotic Front of Liberia. The NPFL announced it was going to overthrow Sgt. Doe.
Taylor and Doe went way back. In fact, Taylor had been in charge of the money during Doe's regime--until Doe accused Taylor of stealing government funds. Of course that was like accusing him of breathing; it went without saying. But the charge meant that Doe and Taylor had had a fight. Taylor had to run off to the US. He was comfortable there, because like most Americo-Liberian kids he'd been sent to school there.
Then, to his own surprise, Taylor ended up in a Massachusetts prison on a Liberian extradition warrant. He was never extradited, though. Instead, he showed up in Liberia as leader of the NPFL. The question is, how did Taylor get out of jail in Massachusetts? Nobody's sure. His story is that he sawed through the bars, Count of Monte Christo style. Other people, cynical types, say he cut a deal with the CIA.
Everybody was sick of Doe, who was destroying Liberia in record time. He was shot, to everybody's satisfaction, in 1990. Taylor got the blame for that killing, along with a lot of others his guys had done back in the bush on their way to the capital. Charles had one of the all-time great answers for these nay-sayers: "Jesus Christ was accused of being a murderer in his time."
I'm still scratching my head on that one. From what I remember of Sunday School, they called Jesus a lot of stuff, but "murderer"? I must've missed that Sunday.
Still, Taylor should know; he's an ordained Baptist minister, and if there's on thing those rock-head Baptists can do, it's quote Scripture at you till you.
After Doe was shot, Liberia just sort of rotted. Taylor's NPFL ran most of the country, but the young guys back in the bush had gotten a taste for carrying guns, killing people and stealing their stuff. For the first time they were starting to feel included in the Liberian political process, and they weren't in a hurry to have things go back to the dull old ways, with some pompous old man in a suit running things from the coast.
And the rest, as they say, is recent history.
- By Gary Brecher
Merry christmas fuckwits
Maybe Williambanzai 7 can make a picture of the ebola virus tied all nicely around a Christmas gift package in a pretty bow?!
Well because its God's will right?
Apparently according to WHO's count three Africans only equals one person? Fascinating stuff.
The citing and education in statistics here is just stupendous. Quite a belief system we got going here. Shows a complete lack of touch with something formerly know as "reality" the world isn't coming to an end its ended already. Jeez KRISTE! Sub nerds deluxe get one at Subways.
Oh, com'on. Cases have decreased in Liberia for five-weeks counting. It's burning out. The WHO is still trying to squeeze the lemon. Just over a month ago WHO said numbers would double every three-weeks. Well, guess what, it ain't happening. It's not exponential.
Hey Lazlo,
I'm counting ~969 new cases in Liberia from Sep 28th to Oct 19th. Can you clarify what you mean by cases are decreasing? Also, can you please elaborate on what you mean by 'it's not exponential?'
Everything I see in the 'official numbers' shows an exponential curve with a generation (doubling) time of anywhere between 12 days (min lower bound) and 30.5 days (max upper bound) depending on the reference source. . . (NEJM, 2014) for the former and (Gire, 2014) for the latter...
Perhaps I'm looking at a different data set? Your input appreciated.
Here what I'm calculating... From the published WHO data for Liberia, I'm calculating an average daily case increase rate of +1.114% in Liberia (from Sep 25th to Oct 19th).
Date // Liberian Total Cases // Pct. Increase per Day
Oct 19th // 4665 // +0.62%
Oct 17th // 4607 // +1.55%
Oct 12th // 4249 // +0.81%
Oct 07th // 4076 // +1.86%
Oct 05th // 3924 // +0.57%
Oct 01st // 3834 // +1.20%
Sep 28th // 3696 // +1.19%
Sep 25th // 3564 // ND
WHO data is "The total number of confirmed, probable, and suspected cases"
The numbers are undoubtedly an overestimate.
The CDC estimate that the under-reporting rate for Ebola infection could be as much as 2.5 times.
In simple terms that means that the 10,000 infections mentioned by WHO are more like TWENTY FIVE THOUSAND INFECTIONS, and the 5,000 deaths reported would be TWELVE AND A HALF THOUSAND DEATHS.
The projections don't look too good either. The CDC are predicting up to ONE AND A HALF MILLION INFECTIONS by the end of 2014.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6303a1.htm
I think I was able to figure out the source of the confusion in terms of the numbers... The details posted in another comment. It comes down to the question of "Are we witnessing a slowing of transmission?" or "Are we witnessing case underreporting?"
Recent WHO data shows a slowing of the 'rate of increase' in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The new data shows a 'rate of increase' that is still geometicrically positive (and so is still 'exponential' growth), but it is at a growth rate 50% slower than WHO was reporting in early September. The question comes down to 'what do these WHO statistics actually imply?'
I think it's a fair argument at this point to make either of the following claims / interpretations, (1) The WHO statistics are evidence of a genuine decline in transmission, OR (2) The WHO statistics are evidence of dramatic case underreporting.
My personal opinion is that we are seeing a phenomenon of underreporting. . . But to get the facts, we're just going to have to wait pending further data... If we could get a second data source other than WHO, that would be useful... Perhaps by looking at direct statistics from MSF and other NGOs on bed occupancy vs capacity.
This is all a CIA driven agenda, ever here of Valkyrie?
If I was President Obama, I'd audit his enemies ASAP.
If I was President Obama I'd send the military to secure the perimeter of the, "hot zone" in preparation of, "The Final Solution".
Because a mathematical calculation from behind a comfortable tenured wooden desk 5000 miles away from reality is soooooooooo accurate.
Notice the most recent statement says that they will "follow" all those who come in from these countries who have had contact or treated ebola patients. And that is fundamental communism. After the fact!
America, our beloved America before we "immigrated" ourselves into a third world cesspool of people who have to be taken care of, accomodated, and protected from our inherent racism (after all, ya got to bring them here so that we can KNOW just how racist we are!) now creates the problem so they can hire more people, spend more money, and "save us" after the ebola (or whatever) is already here.
Same with muslims. Fundamentally opposed to our Constitution and yet we let them in to grow stronger, breed more. Ever heard of nurturing the "serpent at your breast?" Duh...
And yet with the odds so high of continued Ebola patients arriving in the US by airplane, this President will not enforce a travel ban because of his "open border" policy: http://www.gramsgold.com/news/obama-wont-let-ebola-get-in-the-way-of-his...