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Should effective altruists donate to fighting Ebola?
Argument against: usually very famous things that make the news are terrible effective altruist causes and you should stick to well-studied things like malaria.
Argument for: Ebola is very underfunded compared to sexier disasters. And it is a disease in the Third World, a category which has brought us most of the best-known effective altruism interventions.
Thoughts: The CDC estimates a best-case scenario of 20,000 cases by January and a worst-case scenario of about 1.5 million cases by January. They do not estimate risks past January. There are also black swan risks in which Ebola spreads to the entire Third World (eg India) and kills tens of millions of people there. However, on the margin individual donations are unlikely to shift the virus from one of these scenarios to another, so it's probably more worth considering how much good the marginal donation does.
Doctors Without Borders is a very well known, GiveWell-approved charity. They are running clinics in the country, but it's hard to tell how much more clinic they can run per dollar. On the other hand, they are also giving out home infection prevention kits by the tens of thousands. Other charities price these at about ten dollars per kit, although I've seen estimates that differ by an order of magnitude. I don't think anybody knows how effective the kits are going to be, although everyone agrees they are a vastly inferior option to sufficient space in hospitals, which at the moment does not exist.
If we estimate likelihood of 100,000 Liberians (geometric mean of estimates) eventually infected = 2% of the population, then $1000 buys 100 kits buys 2 kits for people likely to be infected..
$1000 for malaria bed nets supposedly gives something like 20 to 100 DALYs, depending on whose estimate you trust.
Ebola death rate is about 50%. Suppose the average infected person has 30 DALYs left to lose. So each case of Ebola costs 15 DALYs directly. But it probably ends up costing more like 30, because I think on average each case infects one other person (I don't think this is meant to be iterate, or else the estimate quickly goes to infinity). So if every Ebola kit was 100% effective, we would expect distributing the kits to save 60 DALYs.
That means in order for kits to be as good as the bottom range of estimates for bed nets, they would have to be at least 33% effective in preventing Ebola among people who get them, which they probably aren't.
On the other hand, every number in this estimate is a total wild guess, and I don't trust that I'm within two orders of magnitude of anything approaching reality. Kits likely cost more when including distribution (I expect charities to underreport costs to make people feel good about giving them), there's no guarantee that there's room for more kits, and my rate of how many subsequent cases are caused by each case is from a half-remembered news article. Does anyone have better ideas for how to figure this out?
I'm late to the thread - just got pointed here from Slate Star Codex. I gave to Doctors Without Borders recently. Your analysis is pretty similar to mine except on two points. Douglas_Knight pretty well covered the first, about iteration. Supposing an infection prevention kit successfully averts an infection, we should not only count the expected half-a-life saved right away, but all the expected subsequent generations of infection that the averted case would have led to, until the end of the current epidemic.
Second, instead of assuming that a preventi... (read more)