Ebola 2014 West African Outbreak
gregladen | September 11, 2014In the earlier days of the West African Ebola outbreak, it was not uncommon to hear people note that we should not panic about Ebola because, after all, far more people are killed from Malaria than Ebola. This is of course an irrelevant argument. That is like telling a person who has lost their family in a tragic airplane accident that it isn't so bad because, after all, far more people die in car crashes than aircraft crashes. For example, on August 5th, James Bell write in the Guardian, in a piece called Concerned about Ebola? You’re worrying about the wrong disease:
Since the Ebola…
gregladen | September 10, 2014The news is bleak. I don't have a lot of confidence in the reported numbers. At one time it was said that on a nice Saturday in the summer, four out of five cars driving around in downtown Boston were looking for a parking place. This is somewhat like the situation in Liberia and possibly other affected areas. There may be as many Ebola victims driving around in taxis looking for a clinic as there are in clinics. Or maybe a fewer. Or, maybe more. Maybe a lot more.
But, we have to work with the data we have. There are two charts based on the information provided by WHO for up through…
gregladen | September 4, 2014I'm just posting the graph and very little info right now. The per day rate of new cases is currently about 123 cases per day, the total number of suspected, confirmed, etc. cases is 3,685 with 1841 fatalities. These numbers no longer include Nigeria (and the one case in Senegal is not included either).
gregladen | September 2, 2014WHO has put out very few updates in the last several days. The most current update is August 28th, and it pertains to information from August 26th and before. Based on that update, the total number of cases (confirmed, suspected, etc.) is ow 3069 with 1552 deaths. The number of new cases per day may be increasing, may be decreasing; hard to say at this point. Here's the new cases per day since the second week of July:
Senegal now has one case, a person who traveled there from Guinea. He had contact with a lot of people including health workers and family before it was figured he may have…