I've had the Mrs. translate an Angolan press release (the Mrs is near-fluent in Portugese):
http://www.angolapress-angop.ao/noticia.asp?ID=337440
Key section:
"Entretanto, 175 casos suspeitos foram notificados até quarta-feira última, na província do Uíge, tendo sido confirmados 89, o que elevou para 264 o número de casos desde o surgimento da doença. A febre hemorrágica matou já 264 pessoas a nível da região."
Translation: There are 175 more suspected cases in Uige. 89 of which are confirmed Marburg. Bringing the total to 264 active or potential cases. It notes that this is equal to the number already killed by the virus.
This ties into Judith Anne's analysis above.
You mean another still living 175 suspected cases, and 89 confirmed cases?
It begins to look like 2ndreconmarine's original projection of around 500 cases by the end of April was closer than we thought....
Ai, caramba!
I don't know what to say except that I'm resigned to merely following trends and anecdotal reporting. This report sounds very bad on the upper extreme, but I am quite sure that there will be one sounding quite credible which is lower in the next couple of days.
To be fair, nobody can possibly know how many infected people have Marsburg in Angola. It's way too primitive and the people are way too superstititous to provide good date for our review. Nobody knows, not WHO, not the Angolan government, not Doctors Without Borders.
They only know what they know and nothing about possible cases that haven't come to their attention.
The official numbers are untrue to the low side, simply because of the reporting problem. I think if they were four times as high, we'd know that as well from anecdotal reporting.
The crisis is far from over. It's still spreading and it could conceivably spread into a major metropolitan center.
But it hasn't yet, and for that I'm thankful.
If that is true, it is disturbing information.
If these numbers are correct, then however you do the analysis (D_c/I_c or # active cases), the growth rate is back up to what it had been in the early part of the epidemic: exponential with maybe a 9 day e-folding time. I don't care particularly about the number of cases per se, it is the growth rate that is of concern.
It is pretty clear that in the early part of the epidemic, this thing was growing fast.
Then, the WHO stepped in and from all indications the growth rate stopped. (We may not like their data reporting, but they evidently did a superb job in slowing / stopping this thing). The number of cases flattened out pretty quickly. Moreover, it is clear from the anecdotal evidence that they succeeded somewhat--as we have all pointed out, the number of cases predicted by the original data did not materialize.
However, as Dog Gone pointed out in his "firefighter" post earlier, the "containment" of the epidemic is dynamic. The natural growth of the epidemic is balanced against the isolation efforts of the WHO.
What I personally have found unsettling about that is that it is funamentally an unstable equilibrium. Like trying to balance a pencil on its end. If it gets away from you, the equilibrium is lost and you are back on the growth curve.
We can still hope that there is something lost in translation here (apologies to the Mrs., tdewey10). Perhaps they meant total cases not active cases. Or perhaps it is a total of 175 potential active cases and only 89 confirmed active cases. 89 is more than 24, but it is only a factor of 4 more, not a factor of 10 more.