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Thank you so much for a very informed reply.

I agree re: aerosol transmission. If it requires only 1 virii to infect then someone coughing can easily infect a whole room.

Sealed hospital rooms would be detrimental in this case vs. camp tents in the bush. And would explain why this particular outbreak in urban/suburban areas ramped up so quickly.

If it’s spread before people become noticeably symptomatic that would explain why the villagers think the healthcare workers bring it with them. Given so many healthcare workers have become ill, they MAY be bringing it with them.

I will pray that mosquitos aren’t a vector. if they are, Africa will depopulate drastically.

To comment on your earlier post, it would appear from the graph that R0 is much greater than one at this point? But who really knows how many dead bodies there are. It’s Africa. And people are in a panic.

Would you think the difference between the mortality of this outbreak vs the past ones may be that so many people have become infected so quickly that they simply haven’t had time to die and become mortality datapoints just yet?

"Would you think the difference between the mortality of this outbreak vs the past ones may be that so many people have become infected so quickly that they simply haven’t had time to die and become mortality datapoints just yet?" First, remember that the aerosol transmission and the point at which this strain becomes communicable comments were only guesses based on very, very limited information. Compared to other Ebola outbreaks, this is way, way worse. The worst in modern times. Compared to other potentially pandemic outbreaks? Too early to say. Spanish flu in the 1910's was fun. Plague was fun, because of the fleas being the intermediate vector. Polio was a scary one. In the 50's people stayed away from public pools because they thought they'd come down with it. We haven't had a good pandemic in a while. A decimator - 1 in 10 dead, or better, I mean. There's no money in vaccine development, so there are no companies working on it. Think about it - you have to spend boatloads, then go through FDA approval - which takes about 10 years, all so you can WIPE OUT a disease in a short period of time, which destroys your market for the vaccine. This is why companies like MAPP exist - it's really a defense industry more than it is a traditional pharma industry segment. It's hard to say whether they are on top of this or not. The half-witted Erin Burnett on CNN was lamenting how the whitey's got the serum while the poor black folk were left to die back in Africa. It never occurred to her that the two white folk are test subjects, and that the serum might have killed them as fast as it seemed to relieve their symptoms. Still too early to tell whether they've got a winner. It's not a vaccine, it's s serum based on Nicotine. The irony of this is that Nicotine's main benefit to society is as a garden pesticide. It's been used in that capacity for many, many years. Spraying nicotine on Ebola, and have it work, would be part miracle and part irony. Not a great deal of standing water in Africa to worry about. Pray anyway, since FLEAS would be far, far, far worse than mosquitos. If we are blessed, the serum works and it tamps it down enough to come up with a true vaccine. Too early to tell yet.

Hi Agnes,

New fatality numbers came out, and that’s what got the ink. However, that’s not the important number in the report.

Wikipedia has an outstanding, and well documented - painstakingly documented - area that is actively tracking the outbreak.

You can find it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_West_Africa_Ebola_outbreak

No R0 figures there, but there’s a graph at the bottom that tracks the outbreak.

The most important line on that graph are the cases.

As you can see, the outbreak is early days, but the cases are showing an exponential curve build up.

One more thing - It’s in Saudi Arabia. A man returning from Sierra Leone to SA died three days after returning. That means he was likely symptomatic on the plane coming home. It’s loose in the SA, and so far there hasn’t been any news or numbers resulting from that.

Recently, however, they have requested help in figuring out how to shut their border (Egypt).

Keep in mind that the SA is also dealing with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak. That’s actually good news for them, as they were on a ‘war footing’ when came home from a visit to SL to the city of Jiddah. Why a country like SA dealing with MERS allows a symptomatic patient board a plane back to SA is beyond me, however. Probably a function of how backward SL is, not SA.

Now, consider that people come from every country on earth to worship at MECCA. You want to talk about the mother of all bad places to take a disease like Ebola - that’s the place.

They come from everywhere to worship - every country on Earth - and then they go home.

I hadn’t considered that yesterday. You can’t make stuff like this up in fiction and have people suspend their belief to buy it.

Make a muzzie sick, then send him to Mecca.

I’ve never considered that religion, sports fanaticism, music fanaticism, or any other proclivity that would bring an infected patient with a possibly aerosolized, highly contagious (1 to 10 individual units of the virus, and long incubating contagion in contact with tens of thousands of people in a single four hour period might impact the overall equation for how fast it might spread.

If they start ringing up cases in Mecca, that will be interesting.

It’s definitely there, however. That’s a new wrinkle.

The cases curve is trending exponential. This likely means an R0 > 1. You can satisfy yourself of that by looking at the infection trends of other viral infections - not just Ebola.

If you look at Ebola trends, you get a gentler slope up with a plateau. The case line at the site is trending ballistic.