Justa, agreed on all you said. They are SLIGHTLY underestmating case fatality for the reason you said, some folks are dying but not yet dead, but not as much as you may think. Most deaths occur within 8 to 10 days, and as time goes on this number becomes a smaller proportion of the total and gets effectively weighted out.
Should this continue the numbers will be useless. Already in Liberia the govt. isn’t counting the dead or disposing of the bodies because health ministry workers refuse to show up to dispose them. Same with doctors and nurses at hospitals -they just stop coming in.
The west central African nations have been dealing with repeated ebola outbreaks for almost 40 years. They have well trained officials and protocols to isolate and treat these outbreaks. Yet they’ve failed to contain it. How will other countries deal with it when all they know is what they’ve read?
My presumption is that first outbreaks in a locale will be dutifully verified and reported due to the fidelity of the local healthcare and bureaucratic systems. When the spread stresses either of these systems all reporting will be useless.
Because of the delay in reporting the status of the 6 NYC cases they may have already surpassed the fidelity of the NYC bureaucracy to cope with it.
>Already, the death rate in Guinea, where the infection was first detected, has reached 74 percent. The overall regional outbreak mortality figure is brought down by lower death rates in countries that were more recently hit: 54 percent in Liberia and around 42 percent in Sierra Leone.<