Ebola is 'entrenched and accelerating' in West Africa | Hacker News Reader

Ebola is 'entrenched and accelerating' in West Africa

bbc.com

35 pointsLibertatea34 comments

There seems to be a big problem with innumeracy in responding to this epidemic. The number of ebola cases is doubling every 15 to 20 days. I guess people don't "get" exponential growth. Otherwise how are there so many statements about resource needs without a time tradeoff mentioned? Liberia needs about 3000 beds today to isolate patients, but only has about 600 currently. The US is helping to build more treatment centers totalling about 2000 more beds... but on a 5-12 week timeframe (to accomodate using Liberian engineers and local resources). In 5 weeks, the need will be for around 12000 beds! Do the leaders just not get the math? Or how else isn't the answer "do it the fastest way possible and nevermind who gets slighted or misses their cut of the business"!

It's not about helping, it's about making a political statement. I can buy pink gear from Susan G Komen and everyone will think I'm wonderful for it, even though Komen is one of the worst cancer charities you can give money to. A politician can vote to build a number of beds that sounds great to voters, but also gives kickbacks to their friends and doesn't actually do anything because doing something costs real money.

What strikes me odd about the Ebola problem is this seemingly fear to do anything about it. With SARS we had many countries preventing people from traveling, we had border checks, and the restrictions affected air travel.

Yet Ebola while not airborne is far deadlier, so where are the travel restrictions? Is there some PC element to this, or is there some fear of perceived over reaction? Considering two recently publicized cases involved people who should have known better (if not the organizations they are part of) screwing up how are we to deal with people who don't know better understanding the signs and risks?

SARS came from China, Ebola comes from Africa....

ADDED: the downvotes I'm getting for pointing out this simple, uncontestable bit of inconvenient truth guessed by Shivetya rather prove my point, yes? (At one point a net minus 3.)

Yep - they absolutely prove your point.

Africa is a continent that the Western, mostly-white-run world has an incredibly troublesome history with. I suspect this is giving us (in the US) internal fits when we try to decide what to do. Almost anything short of sending direct aid makes it look like we are abandoning them and sending direct aid looks suspiciously like a military invasion (because we'll be sending armed troops).

We haven't even figured out how to "deal with" black people here in the US and those guys over there, well, they're foreign black people.

You wrote: "We haven't even figured out how to 'deal with' black people here in the US..."

That's an absurd statement. The US has an African American president. He was elected twice by a large majority.

Ok, so we dealt with a single black person—now what about the community?

I doubt mr Obama is at all African, he was born in Honolulu for crying out loud. All this crap with African-American is annoying and needs to stop. You don't call white citizens European-American, do you?

“I doubt mr Obama is at all African”

<Baracks> father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Kenya

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

A somewhat insightful take on that: http://www.ianwelsh.net/why-africa-cant-handle-ebola-the-des...

That post speaks the truth. Kudos to Mr. Welsh for understanding and clearly communicating the core of the issue - I'll have to read more from him.

I hate saying "me too", but I'll say it anyway.

Me too.

Everyone should read the linked post. It's short, it's to the point. It's depressing. I'm glad you highlighted it, because otherwise I would have skipped it.

I was wrong. We do know how to deal with Africa.

By consuming the bounty and leaving them scraps.

Between levels of service and visa requirements, west Africa is under de facto travel restrictions all the time.

Levels of service have dropped since the outbreak began, and you can bet that, for example, the U.S. State department is not issuing so many visas for individuals in that region.

>so where are the travel restrictions?

I think people are assuming we can contain any cases that arrive in the west which is probably largely true.

Some very interesting things are going to happen in international politics over the next six months, driven by Ebola. And I use the word "interesting" in the same way as it's used in the curse "May you live in interesting times"

I think by early next year it'll become obvious that we're going to lose millions of folks to the disease. What remains unknown is what the containment ability of western societies are. R is overall around 2, but in Europe maybe it's just .2 -- or maybe 1.2. The difference between those two numbers has staggering implications for the future of many societies.

I also do not believe that some sort of massive intervention would work to contain Ebola in Africa right now. Mathematically, yes, you can make the numbers work to show that a huge intervention could contain it. But practically? Not happening. The world is heading down this road whether we're prepared for it or not.

I read some senator wants to hold up the US investment for helping out in Africa for political reasons. I suppose there are no voters in Africa so why spend money there. Not in my back yard often goes both ways. People are dying in Africa, why should we care. Of course this is a world problem but politicians seem unable to grasp that.

It's a nice idea to only repeat things like that if you can find some decent source for it. Here's one:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/09/us-health-ebola-us...

(Well, I think it's useful to provide a source for something like that, it cuts at least 1 step out of the game of telephone that may ensue.)

So Senator Inhofe's concerns about the health of our servicemen sent over there, and how this will play out over the long term (this money is not going to last more than 6 months), are unwarranted, a ruse for parochialism?

Note the DoD is currently using already budgeted money, this is for the future.

I hate to be negative, but really I expect a little better from the BBC on a story as serious as this. Do we really need an interactive photo of someone in an “ebola suit” with such informative labels you can click on that say things like “boots” or “goggles”?

To us such things might be self-explanatory, but not for everyone. A lot of the people most at risk from the disease know nothing of our modern notions of how disease spreads and how to effectively prevent it. Even in the US, a lot of people don't know the specifics of how ebola spreads, there is a lot of FUD.

This seems apropos: the woman in the cube across from mine just announced she had cancelled her airline flights because of fear of ebola virus, and has decided to drive to Disneyland instead (much longer trip). She wants to cancel (fear of ebola, again), but doesn't want to disappoint her kids.

A long time ago I saw some statistics that I can't find again, a rundown of how many people died avoiding airplanes after 9/11. They decided it was unsafe to fly so they would drive across country. Driving is much more dangerous than flying, so the number of deaths went up as people avoided the safety of flying and instead were killed in traffic accidents that should never have happened.

Take the plane. It's always safer.

EDIT - Found it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Admini...

You might be confounding "how many people avoided airplanes", WRT a gambit that was successful for only a few hours (Flight 93), vs. "how many people now avoid the TSA".

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. My point was, flying is safer and avoiding flying leads to more deaths from traffic accidents, which are way more common. The coworker is more likely to have her entire family killed getting to Disney by car than by plane, especially from ebola.

People don't always make rational decisions, and sometimes that can cost a dear price.

One of the things I'm saying is that many people don't view physical safety as the end and and be all by which they guide their lives. What you view as not being a "rational decision" may instead be the reflection of a different value system.

Okay, I understand. Thanks for clarifying. You're probably right, a lot of people do want to avoid going through the TSA lines, as evidenced by the Wikipedia article about the TSA that I linked to. However, the person I was replying to said their coworker was driving to avoid ebola, which indicates that they're not avoiding planes due to dislike of the TSA, but rather to increase their personal safety. Which could end up backfiring, because the chances of being in a serious car accident are much higher than being in a serious airplane incident of any kind.

I get what you're saying, though.

Yes we do need these things, as here in spain they have cut all spending on hospitals, to the level of having simple "supermarket fruit section gloves" when working with patients. Its really fu up and the government, are trying to hide it by saying they are ready etc etc etc. There is not a single public hospital in spain that is technically able to handle the virus, as they dont have the level of isolation units necessary.

It's telling that that hospital's infectious disease ward was closed a few months before, e.g. see https://www.thespainreport.com/11651/spains-health-minister-... which echoing other reports says, quoting someone, it was reopened "in a rush, urgently and at top speed".

Those are just titles. When you click on each of them, you get a more detailed description of what the item is and what risks it helps protect the wearer from. For example:

Boots

Ebola health workers typically wear rubber boots, with the scrubs tucked into the footwear. If boots are unavailable, workers must wear closed, puncture and fluid-resistant shoes.

I read a book about Ebola in West Africa 20 years ago or more ago so "entrenched" is very old news and "accelerating" is last month's news.

It's zoonotic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis), and in fact rather poorly adapted to humans (kills us way too often and quickly, one big danger from this outbreak is that less lethal strains will develop).

So it was "entrenched", or, rather, endemic in we guess fruit bats, the index case was a child in a household where some "bushmeat" was butchered, but not, until now, in human populations.

Note this is believed to have started with one child who died on December 6th, 2013. Exponential growth since then, and nothing specifically foreseeable is going to change that any time soon.

ADDED: if you assume, as many do, there are about 20,000 cumulative infections as of now, that equals a doubling rate of 3 per week (http://www.doubling-time.com/compute.php?lang=en), which also matches some other estimates I've seen.

I was down-voted last time for this,but Please share this Ebola awareness poster. http://bit.ly/1vF1COO

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