Rates of transmission increased from June to July in Sierra Leone and Liberia from 1.4 to 1.7 respectively for every existing case. The statistical analysis is detailed in the paper, "Early transmission dynamics of Ebola virus disease, West Africa, March to August 2014," published today in Eurosurveillance.
1,886 posted on 09/11/2014 7:59:57 PM PDT by PA Engineer
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There are several ways to calculate what officials call the “case fatality rate,” or CFR, of a disease outbreak. One of the simplest is to divide the number of deaths by the number of total cases. That is what WHO does in its recent CFR calculations.
But that method doesn’t take into account that many living patients—recently diagnosed and very ill—will not survive. So it underestimates the death rate. And that effect is exaggerated when an outbreak is expanding quickly. The calculation also misses patients who were confirmed as Ebola cases, but then left the hospital before being discharged, says Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist who studies infectious disease at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. Many of those patients later died but are not counted in the death statistics.
1,897 posted on 09/11/2014 9:43:31 PM PDT by PA Engineer
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