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bramflakes comments on Rationality Quotes October 2014 - Less Wrong
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Zach Weinersmith (Twitter)
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Erin Brodwin Business Insider
I feel the Ebola article makes a false comparison. We have highly competent disease control measures that keeps Influenza's death toll bounded around the 50k order of magnitude per year. With Ebola, the curve still looks exponential rather than logistic - if the trend continues we'll have a 6-figure bodycount by January.
A fairer comparison would be Ebola to 1918 Spanish Flu.
(Oh and that isn't even taking into account that the officials have been feeding the media absolute horseshit about the "single patient" with Ebola)
Downvoted for mindless panic.
There are no measures to speak of to control the flu. It goes through the world every year and we just live with it because it's rarely fatal.
The Ebola curve is not exponential in the countries where appropriate measures were taken, Nigeria and Senegal: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/30/ebola-over-in-nigeria/16473339/ Clearly the US can do at least as well.
While Ebola might mutate to become airborne and spread like flu, and there is a real risk of that, there is little indication of it having happened. Until then the comparison with the Spanish Flu is silly. It's not nearly as contagious.
Your linked post in the underground medic is pretty bad. The patient contracted Ebola on Sep 15, most people become contagious 8-10 days later, so the flight passengers on Sep 20 are very likely OK. There is no indication that the official story is grossly misleading. There are bound to be a few more cases showing up in the next week or so, just as there were with SARS, but with the aggressive approach taken now the odds of it spreading wide are negligible, given that Nigeria managed to contain a similar incident.
My guess is that the total number of cases with the Dallas vector will be under a dozen or so, with <40% fatalities. I guess we'll see.
Upvoted for the firm prediction. Confidence level?
I would say 90% or so.
... And it looks like I was right, if unduly pessimistic. Total new cases: 2, total new fatalities: 0. I expected at least some of the patient 0's relatives to get infected, and I did not expect the hospital's protection measures to be so bad. It looks like the strain they got there is not particularly infectious, which saved their asses.
the numbers of ebola cases were no longer exponential since mid Sept. instead they stay almost constant with ~900 new cases per week since Sep.14 This should have been clear to WHO and researchers at least since mid-Oct. Still they publically repeated the "exponential" forecasts , based on papers using old data. Ban ki Moon (on 2014/10/09) and Chan(on 2014/10/14) and Aylward said it. WHO until now puts forward their containment plan based on 5000-10000 new cases in the first week of december. They didn't correct it yet.
according to Fukuda on 2014/10/23, the WHO-committee on 2014/10/22 on the third meeting of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee regarding the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa stated that there continued to be exponential increase of cases in Guinea,Liberia,Sierra Leone
I'm far from an expert myself but unless, as you say, the experts are feeding us via the media "absolute horseshit" the expected number of U.S. deaths from Ebola is way below 50K.
What countermeasures is that number conditional on being taken?
What we seem to be doing but with significantly more countermeasures if the number of U.S. victims increases. Obama would suffer a massive political hit if > 1000 Americans die from Ebola and I trust that this is a sufficient condition to motivate the executive branch if things start to look like they could get out of control.
Motivation may be necessary but it's not sufficient. The Federal Government is not exactly a shining example of competency.
Will the CDC handle Ebola like FEMA handled Katrina?