Posted on 09/13/2014 11:06:05 AM PDT by Raebie
The deadly Ebola outbreak sweeping across three countries in West Africa is likely to last 12 to 18 months more, much longer than anticipated, and could infect hundreds of thousands of people before it is brought under control, say scientists mapping its spread for the federal government.
We hope were wrong, said Bryan Lewis, an epidemiologist at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech.
Both the time the model says it will take to control the epidemic and the number of cases it forecasts far exceed estimates by the World Health Organization, which said last month that it hoped to control the outbreak within nine months and predicted 20,000 total cases by that time. The organization is sticking by its estimates, a W.H.O. spokesman said Friday.
But researchers at various universities say that at the viruss present rate of growth, there could easily be close to 20,000 cases in one month, not in nine. Some of the United States leading epidemiologists, with long experience in tracking diseases such as influenza, have been creating computer models of the Ebola epidemic at the request of the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Department.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Yes - the prediction and the numbers give me the sense that they can't plug the hole in the dam at this time, so they'll get a better handle on it once the dam fails entirely. Doesn't give one a sense of confidence.
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