Posted on 01/18/2015 6:19:14 PM PST by Theoria
Near the hillside shelter where dozens of men and women died of Ebola, a row of green U.S. military tents sit atop a vast expanse of imported gravel. The generators hum; chlorinated water churns in brand-new containers; surveillance cameras send a live feed to a large-screen television.
There’s only one thing missing from this state-of-the-art Ebola treatment center: Ebola patients.
The U.S. military sent about 3,000 troops to West Africa to build centers like this one in recent months. They were intended as a crucial safeguard against an epidemic that flared in unpredictable, deadly waves. But as the outbreak fades in Liberia, it has become clear that the disease had already drastically subsided before the first American centers were completed. Several of the U.S.-built units haven’t seen a single patient infected with Ebola.
It now appears that the alarming epidemiological predictions that in large part prompted the U.S. aid effort here were far too bleak. Although future flare-ups of the disease are possible, the near-empty Ebola centers tell the story of an aggressive American military and civilian response that occurred too late to help the bulk of the more than 8,300 Liberians who became infected. Last week, even as international aid organizations built yet more Ebola centers, there was an average of less than one new case reported in Liberia per day.
“If they had been built when we needed them, it wouldn’t have been too much,” said Moses Massaquoi, the Liberian government’s chairman for Ebola case management. “But they were too late.”
It was impossible to predict the decline in the Ebola caseload last September, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested a worst-case scenario of 1.4 million victims in West Africa.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Turn away for a few hours and the whole shebang will be stripped down to the dung beetles.
I don't normally use current internet slang here on FR, but...
LOL!
fades? they’re still reporting 75-100 new cases per day
My thoughts as well....
“If they had been built when we needed them, it wouldn’t have been too much,” said Moses Massaquoi, the Liberian government’s chairman for Ebola case management. “But they were too late.”
Then why didn’t you build them? I believe Liberia was founded in 1847; a century and a half wasn’t long enough?
Gibsmedats an ocean away...
There is something in common here....hmmmm.
Yes; that elephant in the room...
Too little too late, like everything we see from Obama. If these had been built a year ago many lives could have been saved.
And the jungle will grow over it and nothing good will ever come from it except to the natives who stripped everything of value from it and traded it for guns so they could join Boko Haram. Something like that.
Well, unless these are paper shelters, maybe they will be useful for the next outbreak.
Actually, if you graph the numbers, you will see that, rather than growing "exponentially", the growth is actually LESS than "straight-line". In other words, the number of cases per day is getting lower.
At the peak, we were getting 260+ new cases a day.
IN the last week of your numbers, that had dropped to about 41 new cases a day.
Remember that they had beds for a certain number of cases already. Since they now have a lot fewer cases, the extra beds we added are going unused.
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