There has been some talk about a big leap upward in Ebola cases, to 12k+, on Wikipedia. While the reported numbers are known to be inconsistent, I will note that this worrisome leap is NOT reflected in the WHO numbers which I have been tracking.
The Week 42 numbers were 9936 cases and 4877 deaths. This is 939 new cases and 384 new deaths, which means the number of new cases has remained essentially flat for six weeks and the number of new deaths is falling. This is actually the first hint of a positive sign on the statistical front; other positive signs are the fact that there was no significant Dallas outbreak despite the lack of precautions utilized outside the hospital there.
This doesn’t mean that the disease is in retreat yet, but the pace of its advance appears, on the basis of the stastistics reported, to be slowing and falling well short of the 4-week redoubling rate that looked troublesome only two weeks ago. Obviously this analysis is useless if the numbers are junk, but if it is too soon to call the pandemic threat over, at least the situation doesn’t appear to be looking increasingly grim.
UPDATE: It appears I spoke too soon. I updated the WHO numbers two days ago, and while the Week 42 numbers were encouraging, the Week 43 numbers were just released today and they are downright problematic. In fact, one rather hopes that they are more the result of belated reporting than the actual jump statistically indicated. The Week 43 numbers report 13,703 cases and 4,920 deaths, which amounts to 3,767 new cases and 43 new deaths. This is 50 percent HIGHER than the infection rate required to continue doubling. The other strange thing is the collapsing number of reported deaths, which almost surely indicates a breakdown of the hospital system in the worst-affected countries rather than a reduction in the lethality of the virus.
I suspect a lot of Americans will be feeling rather conflicted about the latest Ebola news:
A doctor in New York City who recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea became the first person in the city to test positive for the virus Thursday, setting off a search for anyone who might have come into contact with him.
The doctor, Craig Spencer, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital Center and placed in isolation at the same time as investigators sought to retrace every step he had taken over the past several days.
At least three people he had contact with in recent days have been placed in isolation. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which dispatched a team to New York, is conducting its own test to confirm the positive test on Thursday, which was performed by a city lab.
The thing is, this variant of Ebola doesn’t appear to be as contagious as originally feared. Once it became clear that the family who stayed in an apartment with the sick Liberian who died did not become infected, and that none of the police and paramedics who attended him without proper precautions did not become infected either, the logical conclusion is that there will not be a massive African-style outbreak in the USA.
Of course, the logical conclusion can only hold insofar as the information we have is accurate. So, it’s certainly too soon to be confident that the danger has passed. But let’s face it, if the country wasn’t being run by the sort of idiot Axis of Lunacy people elected by NYC voters, there wouldn’t be any Ebola in the country in the first place. Actions have consequences, after all. Vote Obama, get Ebola in your neighborhood.
Vomiting Africans dying on planes is an everyday occurrence, right?
A plane from Nigeria landed at JFK Airport Thursday with a male passenger aboard who had died during the flight after a fit of vomiting — and CDC officials conducted a “cursory” exam before announcing there was no Ebola and turning the corpse over to Port Authority cops to remove, Rep. Peter King said on Thursday.
The congressman was so alarmed by the incident — and by what he and employees see as troubling Ebola vulnerabilities at JFK — that he fired off a letter to the federal Department of Homeland Security demanding more training and tougher protocols for handling possible cases there.
The unnamed, 63-year-old passenger had boarded an Arik Air plane out of Lagos, Nigeria, on Wednesday night, a federal law enforcement source said. During the flight, the man had been vomiting in his seat, the source said. Some time before the plane landed, he passed away. Flight crew contacted the CDC, federal customs officials and Port Authority police, who all boarded the plane at around 6 a.m. as about 145 worried passengers remained on board, the source said.
I have the impression that if Ebola starts to spread, people are going to be very, very angry indeed.
As the Ebola crisis surges to the top issue on the minds of Americans, a new poll finds that 82 percent of those following the issue closely want to quarantine anybody who has recently traveled to the virus-stricken nations. The Economist/YouGov poll found that women are more concerned than men and would refuse entry to anybody from those nations. Just 16 percent would allow them into the nation.
If you want change, scare the women. This is the immutable law of broad-spectrum democracy.
The Ebola curve may not be getting steeper. From the Ebola Response Roadmap Situation Report, 15 October 2014.
A total of 8997 confirmed, probable, and suspected cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD) have been reported in seven affected countries (Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Spain, and the United States of America) up to the end of 12 October. There have been 4493 deaths.
Data for epidemiological week 41 are incomplete, with missing data for 12 October from Liberia. This reflects the challenging nature of data gathering in countries with widespread and intense EVD transmission. These challenges remain particularly acute in Liberia, where there continues to be a mismatch between the relatively low numbers of new cases reported through official clinical surveillance systems on one hand, and reports from laboratory staff and first responders of large numbers of new cases on the other. Efforts are ongoing to reconcile different sources of data, and to rapidly scale-up capacity for epidemiological data gathering throughout each country with widespread and intense transmission.
It is clear, however, that the situation in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone is deteriorating, with widespread and persistent transmission of EVD. An increase in new cases in Guinea is being driven by a spike in confirmed and suspected cases in the capital, Conakry, and the nearby district of Coyah. In Liberia, problems with data gathering make it hard to draw any firm conclusions from recent data.
The good news is that the reported number of total cases are considerably shy of the 9,862 total cases that I calculated last week would indicate that the outbreak was getting out of control. The bad news is that the 8,997 cases reported do not include those that are are missing from Liberia. So, due to the lack of accurate reporting, it’s not safe to assume that the outbreak is already beginning to burn itself out, even though the number of new cases does not appear to be growing at the previous doubling rate any longer.
A second health care worker at a Dallas hospital who provided care for the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the U.S. has tested positive for the disease, the Texas Department of State Health Services said Wednesday. The department said in a statement that the worker reported a fever Tuesday and was immediately isolated at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Health officials said the worker was among those who took care of Thomas Eric Duncan, who was diagnosed with Ebola after coming to the U.S. from Liberia. Duncan died Oct. 8.
The department said a preliminary Ebola test was conducted late Tuesday at a state public health laboratory in Austin, Texas, and came back positive during the night. Confirmatory testing was being conducted at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta…. Officials have said they don’t know how the first health worker, a nurse, became infected. But the second case pointed to lapses beyond how one individual may have donned and removed personal protective garb.
Two patients in the USA in Spain, two deaths, three health care worker infections. This is not reassuring. As I, and every other sane Westerner said at the time, infected aid workers should have been left to their fates in Africa, where they were infected.
UPDATE: The news just gets better:
The CDC has announced that the second healthcare worker diagnosed with Ebola — now identified as Amber Joy Vinson of Dallas — traveled by air Oct. 13, the day before she first reported symptoms. The CDC is now reaching out to all passengers who flew on Frontier Airlines flight 1143 Cleveland to Dallas/Fort Worth. The flight landed at 8:16 p.m. CT. The CDC is asking all 132 passengers on the flight to call 1 800-CDC INFO.
International aid organization Doctors Without Borders said that 16 of its staff members have been infected with Ebola and nine of them have died. Speaking at a press conference in Johannesburg Tuesday, the head of Doctors Without Borders in South Africa Sharon Ekambaram said medical workers have received inadequate assistance from the international community.
But the bigger problem is the sheer number of people involved in UNSUCCESSFULLY treating victims in the West in both the USA:
About 70 staff members at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital were involved in the care of Thomas Eric Duncan after he was hospitalized, including a nurse now being treated for the same Ebola virus that killed the Liberian man who was visiting Dallas, according to medical records his family provided to The Associated Press. The size of the medical team reflects the hospital’s intense effort to save Duncan’s life, but it also suggests that many other people could have been exposed to the virus during Duncan’s time in an isolation unit.
And in Germany:
A United Nations medical worker who was infected with Ebola in Liberia has died despite “intensive medical procedures,” a German hospital said Tuesday. The St. Georg hospital in Leipzig said the 56-year-old man, whose name has not been released, died overnight of the infection. It released no further details and did not answer telephone calls. The man tested positive for Ebola on Oct. 6, prompting Liberia’s UN peacekeeping mission to place 41 staff members who had possibly been in contact with him under “close medical observation.”
So, 111 medical workers with the best medical technology at their disposal couldn’t successfully treat two patients, and at least one worker has already been infected. This does not bode well if the medical system has to deal with 10 or even 100 victims simultaneously.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday said it is starting to “rethink” its Ebola strategy after the first-ever US transmission of the virus put a “relatively large” number of healthcare workers at risk.
“We’re concerned, and unfortunately would not be surprised if we did see additional [Ebola] cases in healthcare workers who also provided care to the index patient,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said.
A nurse at Texas Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas was diagnosed with Ebola over the weekend, raising questions about the procedures that were followed when treating Thomas Eric Duncan. The nurse’s infection “doesn’t change the fact that it’s possible to take care of Ebola safely, but it does change, substantially, how we approach it,” Frieden said.
Notice that phrase: “it’s possible to take care of Ebola safely”. Possible. You are permitting Ebola victims to freely enter the USA because you MIGHT be able to safely take care of them?
They’ve already been wrong once. Who wants to bet his life that they’ve nailed it this time? They might have, but then again, perhaps not. What they need to rethink is preventing anyone who has been in Africa within the last two months from crossing any Western border.
See how useful borders can be, at least in theory, free traders?
First, they said it would never get to the USA. Then they said it wouldn’t spread to the health care workers:
A hospital worker here who helped treat the Liberian man who died last week of the Ebola virus has tested positive for the disease, even though the worker was wearing a gown, gloves, mask and other protective gear when coming into contact with the victim, officials said Sunday.
The hospital employee, a woman whom officials did not identify, worked at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, Thomas Eric Duncan, 42, died last Wednesday. The health care worker reported a low-grade fever Friday night, went to the hospital at some point after that and was immediately admitted and put in isolation, officials said.
One wonders what will be the next statement from a government official on the subject to be exposed as false. Note that a nurse in Spain also caught the virus from a Spanish man who was brought back to Spain by his government for treatment.
The World Health Organization is sending doctors to countries where the virus is most prevalent — Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Fusion’s Jorge Ramos spoke to one of the doctors, Dr. Aileen Marty, who recently returned home to Miami after spending 31 days in Nigeria. She says she was surprised what happened when she arrived at Miami International Airport.
“I get to the kiosk…mark the fact that I’ve been in Nigeria and nobody cares, nobody stopped me,” Marty said.
“Not a single test?” Ramos asked her, surprised.
“Nothing,” Marty answered.
Some say evil, some say incompetent. I fail to see why the Obola administration can’t be both. Let’s face it, our best hope is that the whole thing simply burns itself out without a great deal of help from the obviously overmatched medical community.
So much for that whole “science just works, bitches” meme. It’s unwise to arrogantly challenge Mother Nature.
The total number of confirmed, probable, and suspected cases (see Annex 1) in the West African epidemic of Ebola virus disease (EVD) reported up to the end of 5 October 2014 (epidemiological week 40) is 8033 with 3865 deaths. Countries affected are Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and the United States of America. A confirmed case of EVD has been reported in Spain, but because the case was confirmed during the week ending 12 October (epidemiological week 41), information on this case will be included in the next Ebola Response Roadmap update.
The past week has seen a continuation of recent trends: the situation in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone continues to deteriorate, with widespread and persistent transmission of EVD. Problems with data gathering in Liberia continue. It should be emphasized that the reported fall in the number of new cases in Liberia over the past three weeks is unlikely to be genuine. Rather, it reflects a deterioration in the ability of overwhelmed responders to record accurate epidemiological data. It is clear from field reports and first responders that EVD cases are being under-reported from several key locations, and laboratory data that have not yet been integrated into official estimates indicate an increase in the number of new cases in Liberia. There is no evidence that the EVD epidemic in West Africa is being brought under control, though there is evidence of a decline in incidence in the districts of Lofa in Liberia, and Kailahun and Kenema in Sierra Leone.
Recall that back in July, it was reported: “The current outbreak is the worst ever. So far 467 people have died and health staff have identified at least 292 other suspected or confirmed cases.” That was back in Week 25, so in the subsequent three months, we’ve seen the officially confirmed number of cases increase by 10.6, or if you prefer to put it in scary percentage terms, 958 PERCENT! According to this doubling calculator, the time in which it takes the outbreak to double is 4.39 weeks, so we’ll know that if the Week 41 report contains more than 9,862 confirmed cases, the outbreak is picking up its pace. Either way, the slope of that curve in confirmed cases from Week 25 to Week 40 looks rather problematic.
The fact that one fourth of the case-patients in our study boarded a plane after becoming ill and traveled despite having symptoms illustrates the role of travelers in disseminating infection in a highly interconnected world. It raises the question of whether exit screening should be considered. However, the effectiveness of exit screening will depend on the role of asymptomatic persons in transmission, and such screening will still miss persons who are incubating the infection. Exit screening would severely hinder international travel, and because of its questionable efficacy, it may not be justified and may be contrary to the intent of the International Health Regulations 2005.
So, wash your hands, stock up a bit, and avoid any unnecessary travel, that would be my advice. School vacation time is coming up in many countries in Europe in the next two weeks, so a lot of people have travel plans as a result. If things are going to go seriously south, we should know it in the next 4-6 weeks. To the right is a zoomed-in curve based on the actual confirmed cases reported by WHO from Weeks 34 to 40, added onto an averaged curve from the reported cases in Week 25. WHO only began releasing the reports in Week 34, but during those six weeks, the outbreak has gone from 3,000 to 8,000 officially confirmed cases.
