I thought since we have such better hygeine and cleanliness knowledge and medicine plus doctors, than at time of Black Death, that keeps more from becoming infected...or it spreading as fast at BD in it’s time. Imagine if we did not have those things in place and the scientific knowledge in place? Without all our modern medicine it might have spread like Wildfire.
However with the exposed starting to fly into more places, that might expose more people later, unless they stop them or quarantine immediately.
Black Death took four or five years to spread all across Europe, and it still missed some entire nations like Poland. In today’s Europe it would be across the entire continent in days or at most weeks.
Conditions in West Africa are not in practice much different from those in Europe at time of BD. The quarantine and other measures being taken there do not appear to be having much effect at all in slowing the spread of the disease, with exception of Nigeria where they stomped all over an outbreak, apparently successfully.
IOW, we know what needs to be done to slow the spread of Ebola in West Africa, we just don’t really have any way to put these methods into effect. We have the capability to do these things here, if we will implement them. I’m skeptical our present government will bite the bullet in time.
For a really, really scary portrayal of what a true worldwide pandemic of a disease with an Ebola or BD mortality rate might be like, may I suggest The Last Centurion, a novel by John Ringo? It is perhaps the most wildly non-PC book I’ve ever read. It’s not for everybody, as it’s written in basically a blog-style format, complete with typos and inconsistencies. But I enjoyed it immensely.
It’s built on the notion of a return of “avian flu,” but this time the strain is wildly infectious among humans. Direct effects kill percentages from 25 to 75 in various countries, with the total societal breakdown that follows killing many of the remainder.
The main thing I took away from it is that in a pandemic like this, our vaunted medical care system will be worthless. Yeah, most of those who became ill would survive in a functioning intensive care ward. But the capacity of those wards is by definition set up for the cases normally needed, with perhaps 10% to 20% excess capacity.
Tens of millions of cases, and the hospitals quickly become irrelevant. Especially since the medical staff are as affected or more so than anybody else.
Real SHTF stuff.