“How else can he repeat the 1918 Spanish Flu by bringing back infected troops to American soil? Which killed 50 million people or so.”
You brought up numbers.
Spanish Flu Then (in the U.S)
22 million sick, 675,000 dead
U.S population: 90,000,000
28% of total population got sick.
3% of people that got sick died.
Ebola now
U.S. population: 320,000,000
Percent of population that get Ebola:???
xxx number of people get sick.
Say 50% of people that get sick die (”only” 50% because of our better health care, conditions, etc. )
What if only 1% of American get Ebola (not airborne like the flu)?
320,000 sick
160,000 dead.
Of course that assumes that everyone that gets Ebola can get the proper care.
I read where the Minnesota has a total of 60,000 hospital beds. Lets say that is a reasonable average across all 50 states - so 3,000,000 beds. Regular beds. Say 10 percent of them could be made into secured zones for Ebola patients, that is 300,000 beds.
Okay - so MAYBE, if only 1% of Americans get Ebola if/when it gets here - we might be able to deal with it.
I wonder what the infection rate is in Liberia? I know that if they are sick they have about a 70% chance of dieing in the hospital. But many are being turned away (so sad) - and pretty much a death sentence then.
In Sierra Leone & Liberia, in which the possible 1.4 million cases are projected in a CDC worst case scenario. That would be 14% of their population in 2015. 14% would mean, IMO, absolute collapse there. Even if this happens there, it is hard to extrapolate that to here. We don’t have everyone washing bloody corpses here, for one thing...
Sorry, but your figures were off by a factor of 10.
1.6 million dead.
If you could make suitable beds of 300,000 of them (Doubtful, considering this is a level 4 pathogen), that still leaves 200,000 to die or recover elsewhere.