Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
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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.
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 20... (read more)