In gold mining, the quality of ore is always greatest the closer you are to the surface. The deeper you dig, the lower quality the ore. But those who are bitten by the gold bug refuse to believe this, hoping that if they can just go deep enough, they will hit “the mother lode” of high grade ore.
When selling a nearly played out mine to suckers, its owners will go to lengths to convince them of “the deeper the richer”, even “salting” the mine with gold to make its ore look richer than it is.
It is good to remember this lesson with many things in life, including communicable diseases. It is called “The Law of Diminishing Returns.”
http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/case-counts.html
These are the current stats, by the CDC, of the entire outbreak. I know that someone here at FR is plotting the “actuals”, the real cases, not projections, to figure out the growth curve of the disease.
To date that rate of growth has not been extraordinary. And while still bad for West Africa, the possibility of “10,000 new cases per week” is miniscule.
If Ebola was indeed growing at an exponential rate, by now millions would have been infected, and it would have transcended the ability to count them all.
The truth is that Ebola is winding down. It just doesn’t have the right combination of things to make a gigantic plague.
"less than one in one thousand in those nations have contracted the disease. However, that is NOT good news. It simply means that there remains a huge population yet to be infected with nothing standing in the way of their becoming infected."
I, too, was thinking that the outbreak will not continue at the same rate once the population has been "played out." However, at "less than one in one thousand" infected, with your gold mine analogy in mind, we are still very close to the surface; lots of easy pickings still to be had. I respectfully disagree that "Ebola is winding down." On the contrary, in my opinion, it is just getting started.
Ebola may be ‘winding down’ as you say, however, the reports of demands for increased aid and support are ramping up. There have been recent reports of investigations of fraud related to the distribution of Ebola aid/finances. Opportunistic vultures are circling for every last bit of redistributed wealth they can seize.