Baresark said:
P-89 Scorpion said:
Baresark said:
P-89 Scorpion said:
Baresark said:
First: I see Escapist has jumped on the "OMG PANIC" bandwagon here. That's always nice to see.
Second: I'm in partial agreement about a few things here. In Africa Ebola has a pretty high morbidity rate at this point. The more infected, the harder it becomes to contain.
Third: How in the world does 9200 suspected Ebola cases turn into 200,000 infected. I'm calling bullshit, someone made a big typo somewhere.
Fourth: Maybe someone can explain to me why the WHO denied the "right" of experimental treatments to the people of Africa. Last I checked, if I'm 99% sure I am gonna die because I have Ebola, who the hell are they to tell me I'm not allowed to try anything I want to cure myself (within reason of course).
First infected December 2013
31st March 2014 - 130 infected
30th April 2014 - 233 79% increase
29th May 2014 - 354 34%
30th June 2014 - 759 53%
31st July 2014 - 1,440 47%
31st August 2014 - 3,707 61%
28th September 2014 - 7,192 48%
14th October 2014 - 9,216 22%
If the infection rate continues at a 50% increase every month 230,000 will be infected by the end of February 2015
Unfortunately the above WHO figures are believed to be vastly underestimated as the governments are only giving the numbers of those admitted to hospital, if someone gets ebola and dies before being admitted to a hospital then they are not counted. The WHO believes the real infected rate is 2.5 times higher if that is correct 200,000 by the end of December is possible.
Now, I don't claim to be an expert at the maths, but if it increases by 50% every month, it won't be anywhere near 200k people infected by December, it will be an order of magnitude less, literally.
So, feel free to tell me what I did wrong there. I simply added 50% to the numbers for several months (cumulative of course), unless we are literally assuming the number is 2.5 times less than what is based on actual known numbers. In that case, by December we are looking at 60.5k cases, not 200k cases. Once again, feel free to correct me on how I'm looking at this wrong.
That's what I said, that on current figures it's 200,000 by February 2015 but by the 2.5 times higher the WHO believes are the real numbers then it's 200,000 by December.
I'm sorry, I must be misunderstanding you. It doesn't look like you read my post. I said that no matter how I do the math, I DO NOT arrive anywhere near 200k infected by December. I arrive at 20k by December. And if it's 2.5 times more infected like it could possibly be, I get to 60.5k infected by February of 2015. I'm saying that if I'm wrong, please correct me on how I'm supposed to arrive to those numbers, the first of which looks like a magnitude too large.
Well, the math is complicated but it can be seen in the linked article.
They are using what is called normally a SEIR model. Susceptible, Exposed, Infected and Recovered. To make ti more accurate they added some new categories. The H and F categories, and changing the R to account for the dead/removed. The idea is simple. Divide the population in the categories. Either those that are susceptible, exposed, infected in the hospital, died but still infecting in funerals and those that recovered, died or are in some other capacity no longer in the cycle of the model and are "out". These give you a set of differential equations, telling you how the rate of change of these populations change over time. The parameters, given by the data, give what is called an R0, which is how many people get infected per unit of time basically, which is around 2.2 for the data reported in the countries. That means that every infected person, infect around 2.2 other people (not 1.5).
The solution of those differential equations, for the time being is an exponential equation (the solution is different for larger amounts of time, as the population all got infected and then returned to other states). That means it grows very, very rapidly, especially with an R0 that big.
For the infection to disappear, the R0 must be under 1, (eery infected person infects less than one, so it doesn't recover the population) and what the paper reports, is that measures taken now, would not decrease the R0 under that number (actually the overall R0, seems to stay above 2 for every scenario), which means that the epidemic will not die out with those measures. Which could be interesting to see if those reductions of R0 where dependent on a I0 (an initial number of infected) which would mean that maybe those numbers would be better if applied before the measures before this point.
The time scale is in days in the paper, not months by the way. Just to say. So teh increase of R0, menas that there are 2.5 new infected per each infected each day, not each month.