The absolute numbers are far far below panic-levels but the underreporting and ridiculously-exponential curve is pretty disturbing. It's showing little sign of saturation in the currently-affected populations (an apparent levelling off of infection rates in Liberia was accompanied by reports of difficulty gathering data), it could spread to other populations, and wherever it goes it brings not just ebola but economic disruption, famine, and disruption of health systems that deal with other, more common chronic diseases like malaria and childbirth complications. As of now the measured doubling time is circa 3.5 weeks (a bit longer than that which the worst-case CDC models used but not by much) with each case infecting about two new ones.

The scary possibility is it getting established in additional poor urban populations. It already might be just starting to set off famines where it already is. All exponentials eventually run into a wall and saturate, but it's unclear exactly which walls will do the job here, behavioral or medical or geographc, and exactly where they are and at what order of magnitude they lay. The possibility of thicker spread through larger populations dominates any discussion of the potential effects of the situation.

My feeling is we will know with more certainty the approximate order of magnitude of the issue by Christmas. In the mean time I somehow managed to save a bit recently... money sent. I hope that was paranoid of me.