Ebola - slow to spread, hard to catch. So something like AIDS?

According to recent polls, 18 percent of Americans agree with you - and the election is tomorrow. More importantly, the majority of doctors agree with me on the quarantine. WebMD did a survey of them.

Aha! Just as I suspected, this is nothing but politics. Once again, the Republican playbook laid bare wherein they dont actually care about the country just whether they can smear the President.

Interesting, what percentage of doctors are infectious disease specialists? What percentage of them are experts in this particular disease? Do you know the poll results regarding this subset of respondents?

Two people who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for studying how we respond to diseases like Ebola support some form of quarantine for those who have been potentially exposed. There only difference is whether it should be mandatory or voluntary for health-care workers. The doctor who discovered Ebola, and who now runs the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, supports a quarantine and a travel cutoff. The majority of doctors surveyed also said that the US health care system is unprepared for Ebola.

So popularity equals truth to you.

Classic middle schooler.

And the poll apparently includes a list of survey respondents, if we are to take his response to my questions seriously. Gallup has really stepped up their game! Or perhaps, this guy gets it right:

You still don't get it. If we don't try to keep Ebola out and get up to 130 cases by January 1st, not all those cases will be properly handled. Some of them may even slip completely under the radar for a while, especially in the poor in immigrant communities. The public is going to be frightened and outraged as we watch another conga-line of failures. Obama will come out and say that he is as angry as we are. But that won't stop Ebola, and by then a change in policy may not help much because we'll be fighting it here.

Sierra Leone is looking bad, with on organization reporting that it's spreading 9 times faster than two months ago, which means the doubling rate has perhaps dropped from 28 days to about 19 days. BBC link. That seems to match up with an interview with a director for Doctors Without Borders:

According to Rony Zachariah, coordinator of operational research for MSF, the Ebola impact on Sierra Leone is in fact “under-reported,” AFP quotes.

“The situation is catastrophic. There are several villages and communities that have been basically wiped out. In one of the villages I went to, there were 40 inhabitants and 39 died,” Zachariah told the agency. “Whole communities have disappeared but many of them are not in the statistics. The situation on the ground is actually much worse.”

The latest figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) put the total number of dead at 4,951 out of 13,567 recorded cases.

But the real total could be up to 20,000 people dead, Zachariah argues. “The WHO says there is a correction factor of 2.5, so maybe it is 2.5 times higher and maybe that is not far from the truth. It could be 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000.”

The higher the percentage of Ebola over there, the higher the percentage of Ebola cases in any set of travelers from there to here, and because we can't detect asymptomatic Ebola cases, we're not going to be able to effectively screen them. Heck, we can't even reliably detect all the active Ebola cases. We've also created an extreme incentive for anyone over there who thinks they have Ebola to come over here, because once here they are given medical diagnostics, access to the top hospitals, and a permanent resident visa and a full path to citizenship. Anyone over there who has money for a plane ticket would be a fool not to lie their way over here, and if they're running a fever at the airport they can just take some ibuprofen. As the wealthier West Africans start getting exposed, they're going to come here.

But ignoring the incentive factor and just looking at disease load and doubling rates, back in September we should have expected one Ebola case from West Africa every 5 weeks, based on 150 West Africans coming here per day from a population of about 10 million. Right now the expectation would be one new case every 10 days, because a whole lot more people have Ebola now than back in September. By Christmas that number changes to three new cases per week, again, assuming that the carriers and travelers are selected randomly and that there is no incentive for a carrier to try and make it to the US. By March you're looking at three new asymptomatic Ebola carriers per day arriving in the US. The numbers reach about 26 new cases per day by June, but then it starts to drop because there won't be anyone left in West Africa who hasn't had Ebola, and the outbreak there will just burn itself out.

Meanwhile, the massive influx of Ebola cases will have moved the hot zone over here. If we have 100 cases of Ebola by New Years and it has the same doubling rate, we'll have 800,000 cases by Jan 1 of 2016 (one year later), and it burns itself out here in the summer of 2016, with the US population cut about in half. Making sure that doesn't happen shouldn't be a partisan issue. Even most Democrats don't support letting west Africans travel here freely. In fact, only about 18 percent (some surveys say 15 percent) back the President's "science based" policy. If there's any science behind it, it probably comes from Obama's science adviser who once wrote a book advocating that the government somehow spread a disease through the US to massively reduce our population, and thus our burden on an overtaxed environment.

So we had one guy pass it to two of his caretakers, two doctors flown from Liberia with the illness that got treated in time, the NY doc, and one maybe case in Oregon.



Try harder.

As I said, back in September the expectation was one new case about every five weeks, because the number of West Africans with Ebola was about 0.02% of their population. Now the load is crossing 0.07% of their population, and by the last week of January it could be up to 0.54% of their population. The odds of an asymptomatic carrier coming here in late February will be about 60 times greater than the odds were of one coming in late September, when Duncan showed up. And it will get worse from there.

If you have a policy based on sound risk assessment that says you're probably safe doing A because the odds of a disaster are epsilon, that certainly doesn't mean that you should still keep doing A when the odds of disaster from doing A are 60 times epsilon, the number your original policy was based on. That's a 5 to 10 fold bigger jump in risk than there is between someone who's never smoked and someone who has chain smoked for 40 years.

Out of curiosity, how long does it take to write one of those posts?

-------------------------------------------Tapatalk is limiting my typing speed.

Not long at all, perhaps 5 or 10 minutes. The only element that take any time beyond normal conversational speed is inserting the links and quotes in support. The Hamlet spoof in the coffee maker review in my sig took only about an hour and a half, aside from the soliloquy, which was written a few years earlier and took over three hours. Everything around the soliloquy is just padding to turn it into an Amazon review, which is pretty much how Shakespeare operated.

That case in Milwaukie, OR? Not Ebola. Volpone can relax.

Gawd, I'm fucking drunk in the middle of the week and I can still kill your posts... is this really all you've got?

which you didn't, of course. You said something about the rate of increase in the US being the same as the one in Western Africa, which was estimated at 21 days at the time.

Yeah that and a lot of smoke up a lot of people's asses. You have no fucking clue about what the possible rate is at which ebola spreads in the US. Basically, because it doesn't. Also: because there is no direct relation to the rate it spread in Africa. If numbers go up drastically in Africa, that does not mean the % of infected people on flights goes up equally. Because people tend to stop flying while they are dying. you are pulling these numbers out of your arse.

Care to give us the exact math on this bullshit? Care to give us any kind of math that supports your paranoia? Stop jerking off to people dying in Western Africa. Pull out your checkbook instead instead and donate to MSF.

The number of cases arriving in the US will go up as the number of cases in Africa increases. When the number of West Africans who had asymptomatic Ebola was zero, the number of cases expected in the US would've been zero. If half the population of West Africa were asymptomatic Ebola carriers, the number of cases arriving in the US would be half the number of arriving West Africans.

So two nurses weren't infected in Dallas?

Like the Duncan and the doctor in New York, plus the nurse who flew to Ohio and back? And Ebola carrier is symptom free for one to three weeks, and during that time they have no idea they've got the disease. Do you think Jesus speaks in their ear to tell them not to get on an airplane?

So, any ebola reports in NYC? That one doc was hospitalised about a week back.

Anything? Bueller?

Red Room.

We're just coming into the time where subsequent cases might become apparent. We should know in about a week whether he infected anyone. Meanwhile the city has 470 health care professionals checking over a hundred contacts twice a day.

I have a sore throat. MUST BE EBOLA!!!
I caught it from gturner's apocalyptic doomsday posts and it's making my ears bleed. Hey, I'm on the bus right now! Maybe I can do society a favor!

If you reply to his next message and cough on your screen, maybe you can infect him through the interwebz.

Ron Klain, Obama's Ebola czar, apparently thinks you could catch Ebola over the Internet. I can think of no other reason that nobody has heard from him, unless he's the only person we've decided to keep in quarantine.

Wow, time to lay off the booze there, enlisted person.

/me violently sneezes on screen

It probably won't surprise any of you that I wear my chem-bio hazard suit around the house.

/me sprays screen and keyboard with a dilute solution of Clorox and Windex.

gturner, supporting More Gubmint Interference:

Now we get to see if Republicans actually allocate the money the president requested for ebola or not. That is when we will know if they really give a shit or if they were just teying to make the dullards scared so they'd vote R.

So, a guy on FB from my last ship was told that ebola is an STD. By a Navy doctor.

There's a reason that the guy that graduates at the foot of his med school class is called "lieutenant"

I know in the army the reputation was that a lot of them some how screwed up and could no longer get malpractice insurance so they couldn't be civilian doctors any more. Lucky for them the army will not only take them but give them a big bonus.

It did make me wonder about the quality of the care though.

Maybe he was being literal? I mean it could be transmitted through sex alone couldn't it?

It could be, but my experience with the navy and medicine would have Demiurge sending thank you cards and naming his next few children after the guys that fucked him over in his cancer treatments.

Come on, where's the hysteria?