You've got this wrong. The fatality rate for Ebola Zaire (the strain that's in Africa right now) has historically been between 70% to 90%. Right now in Africa the exact numbers are very hard to quantify since the true number of infected and deaths aren't really known. There's no reason to think that it's NOT still between 70% and 90%.
Marburg death rates run between 24% to 88% according to WHO
. I'm glad that diseases like Ebola and Marburg aren't very contagious.
I'm not sure where you get this idea. Ebola is very virulent. The virus literally pours out of the bodies of victim and it takes a very small amount of the virus to infect someone. And even if you believe that it's NOT contagious...we had better treat it like it is highly contagious because of the high death rate.
If you're comparing it to something like the measles than sure, it's not very contagious. But measles aren't going to kill up to 90% of its victims. If 100 people get measles from someone else nobody is going to die. With Ebola, chances are greater that whoever gets it, dies. So if each victim "only" infects one person in their sphere of influence that's a massive death rate.
CDC table of Ebola outbreaks. The lethality rate of Ebola Zaire ranges from 47% to 89% (I do not count the single cases since an outbreak of size n=1 is either 0 or 100%). I really do not know how the WHO comes up with the 70% number for the current outbreak; my calculations show the CFR as being far lower.
Marburg death rates run between 24% to 88% according to WHO
I quoted that 83-90% Marburg fatality figure directly out of the MMWR report on the imported Marburg case that I previously linked. If that number is incorrect, take it up with the authors of that report.
I'm not sure where you get this idea. Ebola is very virulent. The virus literally pours out of the bodies of victim and it takes a very small amount of the virus to infect someone. And even if you believe that it's NOT contagious...we had better treat it like it is highly contagious because of the high death rate.
Virulence (pathogenicity) is not contagiousness. A disease can be highly virulent without being at all contagious. Malaria, dengue, chikungunya, tick-borne encephalitis, all fall into the virulent but not contagious category.
In general, virulence is inversely related to contagiousness. Common colds, for instance, are very contagious but not very virulent. This inverse relationship between the contagiousness of a microorganism and its virulence has been observed so often that it is almost a paradigm among microbiologists and other infectious disease experts.
Virus does not "pour out" of Ebola patients. It is contained within bodily fluids, and in order to get Ebola, one must have close contact with the patient or with the infected fluids. This means that Ebola is not very contagious. It is, however, highly infective since only a few viral particles are capable of causing clinical disease.