Three hundred thirty-three deaths.
How many deaths does the U.S. experience every year just from influenza? I don’t know, but it is a lot more that 333!
It is the percentage who recover from Influenza which makes it preferable to contracting Ebola, not the bulk number of deaths.
This is 333 in a reasonably isolated third world craphole. If it ever gained a foothold in a civilized country within weeks there would be nobody to even pull the cart and cry out “bring out your dead”.
This is not influenza or even close.
“How many deaths does the U.S. experience every year just from influenza? I don’t know, but it is a lot more that 333!”
With influenza the deaths are primarily the elderly. It rarely kills those who are infected. The population, 330 million or so, hardly notices. But Ebola kills 99% of those infected regardless of age. The potential infection areas in Africa are relatively unpopulated populated. But when it gets to a village it has been known to kill everybody.
If Ebola got to, say, New York, we could be looking at 20,000 deaths per day. People would flee New York and it would go with them and rapidly cover the country. In the 1918 flue epidemic my grandfather went with the sheriff to put a sign on the main road that influenza had reached the town. They were lying in the hopes of keeping people fleeing large cities away. But it was too late. The flu hit their tiny town and killed a hefty percentage. Ebola would likely have killed them all.
That’s the difference. BTW, at the last large outbreak Iran sent “doctors” to collect samples. Imagine weaponized Ebola in the hands of people who think dying for Allah is the best thing they can do.
From an epidemiology perspective, that is apples and oranges. The mortality rate of novel H1N1 case is minuscule compared to ebola/ hemmoragic fever. H1N1 (common influenzas) really don’t kill you - the complications of it do. Ebola *DOES* kill most infected humans.
It’s bad stuff. Won’t spread much in 1st world countries or amongst populations with decent health and sanitary habits. But still bad stuff.
posting from mobile; excuse typos
Around 40,000 to 50,000 people die from influenza every year.
The big fear about Ebola is its case fatality rate, which is well over 50% and can run up to 90% in some strains. It is spread through contact with infected bodily fluids, so is not as contagious as flu. If Ebola were to somehow become highly contagious, the results could be devastating. However, most viruses show an inverse relationship between lethality and contagiousness--if Ebola is the same way, then it would become less lethal if it became more contagious.