WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is our CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/situation-summary/index.html
And yes, this is a big deal. Public health emergencies of international concern are a short list consisting of, in their entirety: swine flu ('09 to '10), polio ('14 on), ebola ('13 to '16), Zika ('16), ebola ('19 to '20), Covid ('20 to '23), monkeypox ('22 to '25) and now this [1]. It's one step down from a pandemic emergency (which, to be clear, has not been declared).
(Helpful explainer: https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2....)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health_emergency_of_int...
Instead a great deal of modern infrastructure like subway systems makes things more difficult not less.
infrastructure density matters, but it doesn’t affect both the same way.
Ebola like many viruses can be contagious without direct touching.
It’s not well adapted to airborne transmission, but it’s very good at causing people to spread bodily fluids all over the place. So a very sick individual passing through a subway seeking medical treatment could infect a large number of people.
> reproduced and mutated as rapidly as viruses
HIV spreads in similar ways afaik (some fluids, I don't know the details of Ebola but it's not respiratory), yet that hasn't gone airborne in decades. I'm well aware that pigs don't get a million offspring each, but it doesn't seem like a common event for viruses to completely change their mechanism overnight either. Hence the quadrillion odds I mentioned, I was indeed referencing that they mutate so much, and yet...
Yes. A single gene change allows for airborne Ebola transmission. This gene change has occurred in the Reston strain, which luckily does not cause symptoms in humans.
This isn't straight Ebolavirus (Zaire), but this thing [1]. We don't have enough data yet to confirm it spreads like Ebola among humans.
I'm OK with some caution.
Haven’t we been burnt by being not cautious enough when COVID hit? Initially most scientists said “we don’t know if it’s airborne” or they said “there are no signs that it’s airborne” and the media turned it into “nothing flying fear” - and a few weeks later it was suddenly airborne.
“We don’t know” is a normal state in science and policies and personal behavior can take unknowns into consideration.
Based on what? The final body count?
This isn't a weather forecast, people and ressources flew towards making sure these emergencies didn't spiral into global pandemics.
You are falling face first into the preparedness paradox.
That's the only one on the list that turned into a pandemic emergency.
> they declared an international emergency, not a global one
...you're mincing words in a silly way.
> there is no chance this spreads outside of sub-saharan Africa
Not what the public-health experts are saying! We currently don't actually know where it's gone. Given multi-week incubation periods, we won't know for a couple weeks where it is right now.
Keep in mind that eastern DRC and South Sudan are host to multiple internationalised conflicts right now. There are easy ways this could spread to the Gulf, Russia, America or Asia through troops and trade.
Well, no wonder. Ot was introduced only in June 2024.
Also, the article says surveillance picked up the spread late. I wonder if the US's pulling back from the WHO and other international functions had anything to do with this, it used to make up a big chunk of its resources and staff.
That said I'm quite hopeful, since there is a vaccine for other strains.
Is that like a general rule, or pure bunk? (I'd probably assume the answer 'depends').
I understand the jury is still out on whether a virus can be considered "alive" but, like us, it is capable of replicating itself and mutating. In that sense, it benefits from the same evolution strategies as more complex beings: a strain that gets its host very sick very quickly gets a lower chance to spread to a new host and multiply.
This creates an evolutionary advantage for strains of that virus that are less aggressive or at least develop the worst symptoms more slowly and more covertly.
I remember way back in med school in the mid-70s our infectious disease professor asking this same question, in a philosophical as much as a mechanistic sense.
That allowed for a deadly disease that's somewhat hard to spread (mostly just through sex) to ultimately go on a rampage.
So without concern for the humans with HIV* there an argument to be made that treating symptoms without curing made it spread more?
*obviously, this is just hypothetical. It’s important to care about the life of those with HIV. No banish them all to something like a leper-colony. Although it explains the logic for those at the time they existed better than a religious one did.
No, because HIV treatment is about killing the virus, and we don't have any that only treats the symptoms.
But there is an argument like that for the flu and colds.
The treatments we have now also decrease the risk of spread significantly.
It's a bit like the chickenpox. Once infected, you always have chickenpox ready to burst out in the future as shingles. But for the most part, it's dormant and you aren't infectious.
HIV treatment does the same. It doesn't clear your body of HIV, but it does decrease the HIV load to such low levels that it can be undetectable. That, in turn, decreases the likelihood you'll spread it.
The modern treatment regime was developed around 2010. That is, about 15 years.
I'd argue that with the timeline of the disease that's not recent. What's become more recent is the mass availability of treatment and the significantly reduced cost of treatment.
Compare this with HIV, which can be rendered untransmittable with modern treatments, which is primarily a sexually transmitted disease, which has pre- and post-exposure treatments. It's simply not very efficient/effective to exile millions of people with a lifelong latent infection and little risk of transmission.
The instinct towards ostracism of those who are perceived as unclean is some pretty primordial lizard brain shit which was a great rule of thumb two thousand years ago, along with wearing garments made of only one kind of material. It's actually actively harmful to the process of stopping infection. It leads to fear, distrust, and reduced reporting, hindering the medical system's ability to reach the people who most need to be reached, and encouraging the spread of superstition and suspicion of pre- and post-exposure treatments. In both diseases, the actual infection risk is modest compared to an airborne virus like COVID.
[1] https://journals.lww.com/jphmp/Abstract/2022/03000/Estimatin...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34189844/
[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4252165/
[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7875361/
[5] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/73/10/1849/6168541?logi...
The most successful strategy is to make a virus that spreads fast, with few visible symptoms until the late stages of the disease. A deadly virus, early will just cause borders to be locked and the international research community to swarm on a cure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxomatosis#Australia
there are ways to escape the dynamic, such as latency of deleterious symptoms
The us is not involved in this mess.
If by not involved you mean still massively subject to the public health and econonomic consequences of a containment failure, then sure.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...
"Case fatality rates in the past two [Bundibugyo virus disease] outbreaks, reported in Uganda and in DRC in 2007 and 2012, have ranged from approximately 30% to 50%" [1]. Given "as of 15 May, a total of 246 suspected cases and 80 deaths" were reported, the current disease's 33% fatality rate is in the historic range.
[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...
The OG Ebola had almost 100% fatality rate, and a short gestation time (I think only a few days). It didn't spread too far. The one that killed a few thousand people, though, had about a 50% fatality rate, and I think its gestation period was a bit over a week (these are the products of a faulty memory, but quoting LLM output isn't considered polite, hereabouts, and, for all we know, they could hallucinate the stats, anyway). Also, a hemorrhagic fever pretty much chews up your organs, so it's likely to drive bad health outcomes, for the rest of our lives, even if we survive.
HIV/AIDS has (the meds just keep it at bay) a 100% fatality rate, but a very long gestation period.
COVID, I believe, had about a 1% rate, in the OG variant, and that brought the world to a standstill. I think Spanish Flu (another world standstill), had about 2.5%, and a relatively short gestation period, but it was also quite communicable.
The claims that caused lockdowns were 3-10% death rate.
The world was brought to a standstill primarily due to massive fearmongering. The earliest high rates came from three things: Conflation of "infection" and "case", rationing of tests to people doctors were already pretty sure had been exposed (suppressing the denominator and inflating the rate), and biased samples (for example the Diamond Princess cruise ship was weighted towards the most susceptible population and maxed out 1.2% a month after the lockdowns had begun).
1. A comment on this forum is not really the place to convince people of such a bold claim. It deserves at least an article/blog post, and maybe even a short book.
2. There is a large jump between the claims [the initial fatality estimate was high] and [the world was brought to a standstill due to fearmongering]. This gap is perhaps something you could address in a longer blog post
This is exactly the kind of topic that I’d love to see gwern or slatestarcodex tackle. There might be some truth to your story, but it’s a complex topic and needs a _ton_ of discussion
Even with the lockdowns, Covid nearly overwhelmed the healthcare system in America. It led to a massive nursing shortage as nurses quit. The system could not have handled more cases appearing faster.
Had it expanded faster it risked not only infecting a larger portion of the population pre-vaccination but also seeing more people who would have been salvageable with treatment dying innecessarily.
Pretending we could have experienced the death rate we did in our experience whilst also adopting a different strategy is farcical reasoning.
I think a lot of anti-lock down claims are too simplistic. There were too many unknowns, and there's little consensus about the ideal outcomes.
(I'm a bit biased: I was able to do remote work and move to my parents house, which is quite spacious and near the woods, so I could go outside a bit - so it didn't affect my finances or mental health too much)
Oh dear. This has found its way on to HN. Since finding resources that clearly explain the situation is difficult from the west and difficult in english, the situation is many times more complicated. It's true that some of the resources that flow out of the eastern DRC flow out through Rwanda. It's true that M23 is clearly backed by Rwandan people and money. And for the record, I do not support any of the involved groups or states, but I do speak a couple of the many involved languages, and I did marry into the region, and I have spent years in north kivu in both the congo and in rwanda, southern Uganda, and a little in Burundi, and a little in Tanzania, and I have a large social network across the region.
Let us start with the surface level. M23 is just a puppet of Rwanda for regional imperialism, right? But the profits of the mines in the east Congo have never gone to the east Congo: the DRC has been essentially refusing to build infrastructure, or even govern, the east Congo since Zaire, since the first DRC, since the Belgian Congo, since the Congo Free State. And it's not easy, either: trying to govern Goma from Kinshasa is like trying to govern Berlin from Lisbon, but without developed roads or trains, through dense forest and up a river with many cliffs and rapids that make using it... actually governing the eastern Congo from Kinshasa is absurd. It's purely through the insistence of the west that this actually be the case.
Second, the DRC has one of the worst militaries (the FARDC) in the world. Probably easily the worst compared to the insane wealth it sits on top of. It's not a mistake: there has, essentially, never been a peaceful transfer of power in the country's history since colonization. This has been exacerbated by the literally hundreds of local militias that pepper the north and east of the country, actively armed by the government. This creates a situation of lawlessness and violence seen in few other places on earth: for instance, it has the highest rate of sexual violence of any place on earth, one of the highest rates of malnutrition, one of the lowest literacy rates, one of the lowest life expectancies. So: the country invests in collecting money from the mines as policed by its own military, invests in local militias to counter the military, and refuses to actually govern the area to enforce its own laws, build schools or hospitals, educate its populace, develop some of the most fertile ground on earth, let alone actually build supply chains around the mines it produces. By all reason it should be one of the wealthiest countries on earth, and yet it is not.
Third, the ethnic conflict of abanyarwanda never vanished. Not only does the FDLR (the remnants of the interahamwe) survive and thrive in the Congo after having fled their blatant attempt to exterminate the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, it is actively armed and works with the FARDC. Today you can go onto TikTok and find members of the FDLR who were born in the Congo talk about how much they hate the Tutsi and want to exterminate them once and for all. For the last six decades, the radios of northern and eastern Congo are filled with rhetoric about the Hema/Tutsi/Nilotic conspiracy to dominate the Bantu (Hutu/Lendu). Think the anti-semitic rhetoric we're all familiar with, but amplified by a conflation with hatred of the bourgeois, all driven from a city 1500 kilometers away. For a region that has one of the lowest literacy rates on earth, this means that violence has simply not stopped during this time. And yes, even today, abanyamulenge are subjected to concerted, state-driven, mass violence—because the locals think that Rwanda, the hand of Hema imperialism, has been on a centuries-long campaign to drive the Congolese from the region and take it out on the highland herders. The Hutu have, of course, also been subjected to mass violence for decades—including multiple obvious and internationally recognized genocides—but anti-hutu rhetoric is certainly not spread by Rwanda, or (by all indications available in the languages I can read) M23, or any of the AFC.
Why does the DRC actively perpetuate this ethnic conflict? Because it is a barely functional state, and the rulers are all deeply corrupt, and much of this money flows from the mines in the east, and it is easier to blame ethnic conspiracies than it is to build roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, electrical infrastructure, and in short develop anything. To admit the reality in naked terms—a necessary step to heal—would immediately start a civil war across the entire country, which is again barely tied together with twine to begin with. Both Kabila Sr (...an enormously interesting man) and his son clearly attempted to govern in an idealistic sense... but both eventually turned back to relying on ethnic tensions to explain the poor governance, particularly outside of but also in Kinshasa itself (...confusingly, but racism has rarely been very rational)
And of course, the mines are of deep international interest. Specifically, Canada, the US, China, and the UAE (I'm sure others too) all have their grubby mitts in the region developing only the infrastructure solely necessary to extract minerals, raping and enslaving the local populace, and paying off all the local governments to keep this ruse going. The governments of Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and the DRC are each complicit in this obvious crime against humanity, each interested in their cut of the dollars that flow outward.
Now, of course, Trump managed to meddle in the region, and Erik Prince with his blackwater thugs are there ensuring that the terror of drone striking civilians and villages is well understood by the people of the eastern Congo. The DRC is now using US and UAE funds to build a new paramilitary to police its mines. The result will almost 100% certainly be a larger civil war in the east in the best case scenario, and in the worst case scenario complete regional total war with millions dead. Tshisekedi has obliquely telegraphed a desire to seize territory and/or topple the states of Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi—in part because he realizes his life depends on the region not successfully ousting him. (Though—Burundi is now acting as a sort of mercenary force for the Congo, which is again unwilling to bankroll its own military, but I would not expect this relationship to last for very long.)
And do I support M23, the AFC? No. Absolutely not. But there is no solution for the region short of peace, and there is so many arms and so little infrastructure and so little centralized authority this is simply not possible. At the very least, it needs 100x the international attention and capital inflow that it is getting, and I see about as much chance of that as a wounded calf being saved from a pack of ravening wolves in the middle of nowhere. So is it surprising that Rwanda (or Uganda, or Burundi) has their troops in the DRC? No, not at all—it is an enormous, enormous existential risk to not do that. The east Congo makes the balkan powder keg look wet.
I'm sorry to have typed so much, but it is infuriating to watch the violence tearing apart my beloved north kivu being written off by one interest or the other as a simple conflict. No, there is nothing simple about the conflict, it is an enormous tragedy, and it was international intervention that created this problem with the Congo crisis—all to preserve precious mineral extraction supply chains. By all rational understanding I have, the east Congo should have some degree of self determination rather than being exploited and enslaved by Kinshasa, Uganda, Rwanda, the US, Canada, the UAE, and China—and there is simply zero path to that. Paradoxically, the attention M23 is bringing the region may have resulted in more efforts to govern.
And in the case of Ebola, nobody gives a fuck. Hah. LMAO, even. There is simply zero chance that something as delicate as disease management will visit the region before the governance question is answered. If this concerns you, become a praying person.
The resource is deeply outdated, and it has its biases and blind spots and points of frustration where the journalist who wrote it sees things from a very western perspective and/or was manipulated by the person he was interviewing or he is too skeptical to see what is in front of his face, but from the west if you only know English, I recommend the book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns.
I'm afraid I have mildly butchered the topic, but there is no easy way to approach the utter shallowness of which this will be seen from the west. The Congo suffers from a "resource curse", and I'm afraid it will be exploited until long after I die.
EDIT: there are other resources, some better than others.
EDIT2: cleaned up my language a little bit to reflect the seriousness of the topic.
The War That Doesn't Say Its Name, also by Jason Stearns.
Crisis in the Congo: The Rise and Fall of Laurent Kabila by François Ngolet is pretty self-explanatory and illustrates well why the issue with Zaire wasn't just Mobutu, though he was particularly incompetent.
Les guerres à l'est de la RD Congo, entre génocide et statocide by Claude Nsal'onanongo Omelenge. This is the best work and most academic, but my French is rusty, so I may be overpraising it. I've had a hard time getting my hands on this one but there are PDFs if you look carefully. If you're in Europe it might be easier.
The Trouble with the Congo by Séverine Autesserre explores why peace efforts have failed.
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo by Michela Wrong and The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State by Crawford Young and Thomas Edwin Turner explore the damage Mobutu did to the post-colonial Congo (Zaire).
Congo, A Sublime Struggle by Finbarr O'Reilly is more of a personal account, but it has excellent color pictures and you can feel the emotional investment in the topic.
Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba by Madeline Kalb, The Congo Cables by Emmanuel Gerard, and Chief of Station, Congo by Lawerence Devlin explain the Congo Crisis and the role that specifically the US, Belgium, and less directly the UN played in ensuring that the original DRC survived its postcolonial civil war. Carnages: Les guerres secrètes des grandes puissances en Afrique by Pierre Péan covers the francophone vs anglophone meddling in the region.
La guerre civile du Congo-Brazzaville specifically covers the rise of militias, the incentives, the funding, etc. It is a tad outdated in the current conflict—I don't know of a good resource to cover funding of militias today, but I will figure something out.
La première crise congolaise racontée aux Camerounais by Jean Koufan Menkéné is a historiographically good overview of the Congo Crisis (1960-1965) in general.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa covers The Congo Free State, perhaps the most ironically named country of all time as it covers how the state was the personal property of Leopold II
In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism by J. P. Daughton is quite good and, well, self-explanatory.
Finally, if you're a fan of Adam Curtis (a documentarian, but a propagandist of the greatest order, albeit one I tend to agree with), he has an excellent series called "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace". The final episode covers postcolonial Congo. You can find that here: https://archive.org/details/BBC.All.Watched.Over.by.Machines...
Thanks for the recap
Found this interesting tidbit on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Rwanda: > Although these groups were distinct and stratified in relation to one another, the boundary between Tutsi and Hutu was somewhat open to social mobility. The Tutsi elite were defined by their exclusive ownership of land and cattle. Hutus, however, though disenfranchised socially and politically, could shed Hutuness, or kwihutura, by accumulating wealth, and thereby rising through the social hierarchy to the status of Tutsi.
You start like you're disagreeing with me, but in the end it seems to me you're just providing some (very much needed) context around the whole quagmire.
The Eastern DRC has been a mess since forever, and nobody's actions seem to be towards improving the situation. But ultimately, M23 control parts of it, probably couldn't care less about public health, and they're why Rwanda is suddenly a major resource exporter for things it doesn't have. Nobody is saying it's simple, but that's the headline.
I spent my childhood in the Kasaï-Oriental - my parents were aid workers - and though I lived through some of the key periods of the country (Kabila Sr's rise and assassination) I was young and had no idea of the more general goings-on beyond our town. I've been trying to learn more about the period and I imagine these will be very helpful.
I wonder if my French is still good enough for Les guerres à l'est de la RD Congo...
1. It could spread airborne;
2. It spread relatively easily. Not quite measles-level of contagiousness but still, pretty good;
3. Unlike something like the flu, there really wasn't any kind of natural resistance. What we now call the modern flu is a descendant of the Spanish flu that killed tends of millions in 1919-1920 in its first outbreak and it becamse less lethal for a variety of reasons; and
4. (This is the big one) It would spread when the carrier was asymptomatic. The flu can also spread asymptomatically but AFAIK it's less common. People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms.
Still, what's probably most concerning about Covid is the number of people who truly believe it was and is fake. The public health implications of that as well as the societal and psychological impacts is something we're going to be studying for decades to come.
The exact contagion mechanism for hantavirus isn't confirmed. Previously it's been from, say, rat to human. It's believed there was human-to-human transmission with the plague cruise ship of doom but whatever the case, it's simply not as contagious.
Ebola generally requires contact to spread. How it's spread in a lot of these African regions has historically been from funeral rites. Family of the deceased would touch the body and this contact would spread the disease. So while it was quite contagious, it didn't spread airborne (as far as we know). It's also quite lethal, which naturally tends to limit spread. The king of long-dormant viruses is of course HIV.
But at least we aren't dealing with cordyceps [1] so we've got that going for us at least.
[1]: https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_brain_infectio...
I'm on the border of three countries and you'd always see symptom reports go up in a region, sewage analyses go up, hospitalizations go up, and finally shortly before mortality started to show an increase (several weeks' lag from the moment of infection) they'd decide "guys, here's the statistics, we have to lock down now". Yeah great, now that everyone caught it they have to pretend being on the ball. And people still literally rioted against lockdowns. Or the masking thing, the resistance against filtering your breath... at this "too strong" level in your opinion, I don't see that the outcome was significantly different from "yolo protect yourself as much as you like but don't expect anyone else to be mindful"
Tough to say that's "exactly the right amount of deadly" for a pandemic when the Black Death and Spanish flu killed larger fractions of their total affected populations (in the latter case, of humans) [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemic...
Also, the window for spread with the ability to get on a plane and be on the other side of the world post infection, but pre symptoms is a "latter half of the 20th century" thing.
Do you have any other fantasy tales you’d like to tell?
Shit pay, no benefits, and managers who threaten to fire you if you dont show up. Sick? Puke in the bathroom.
Whys this the case? Cause we Americans have garbage for labor laws. You can be fired for pretty much any reason. And you are NOT protected if youre sick.
When I had to work food seevice, at starbucks, subway, random pizza chain, etc, I begrudgingly came in sick, infected LOADS of customers. My choice was to work, or get fired (or not fired but 0 hours for next 2 weeks on schedule as punishment).
Who knows how many I got sick and potentially killed due to compromised immune systems. Im sure I did.
This is the real, hidden external cost, of our unmitigated capitalism. People get sick and die for the reason of making the boss more money, and too fucking bad.
And healthcare being tied to "having a good enough job".
But yea, it's a huge mess.
I've had flu twice, and both times I simply wouldn't have been able to leave the house no matter how much I wanted to - even just turning over in bed was a major effort!
Would people not have spotted their shivering and sweating and sent them straight home again?
In Australia, full-time employees (38 hours or more a week) will grant you 10 sick days a year. You can use this at effectively any time (Some employers may request medical certificates for consecutive days) but when using it, you are paid your full normal rate for the hours you are away from work for. Once you run out of sick leave, you can then use "unpaid sick leave", which is exactly what you expect.
It always goes like this with me, the first few days:
- Hm, am I coming down with something? Not too sure. Feel a bit under the weather
- I'm feeling great! Let's go shopping/for coffee/to the supermarket/see friends
- OHH I definitely have flu
> Approximately one-quarter (26%, n = 303/1169) of adults (aged 16–64 years) with self-reported ILI took time off work for their illness for a mean of 3.3 days, compared with 31% (n = 31/99) and 20% (n = 3/15) of those with confirmed influenza A or B, respectively, who reported missing a mean of 3.8 and 3.0 days.
Anyway: taking time off work when too sick to work != isolating when the symptoms first appear.
> "It would spread when the carrier was <LARGELY> asymptomatic" , the largely is very important here otherwise containment would have been a lot different.
The main concerns for covid were also limited to a novel strain of a known virus type (again a KNOWN TYPE) being released into a global general populous with no inherent immunity. Aka expect ~5% of cases to probably have complications and some smaller %-age of that to be serious. If we didn't know what covid was we wouldn't be calling it "covid-19" to expressly describe which genus we're talking about. (Followed by general stupidity from people of pretending we don't know how other covid strains progress (regardless of any 'novel' effects)). Sill no sensible scenario put death rates >1% for anyone not in an at risk group. I mean everyone forgets the south-park sars skit that there's a 97% chance of catching that practically without symptoms. Why this became polarised about steam rolling through untested technology onto the populous is identical to the "green coal" and "tech will solve the carbon footprint" thinking...
Public-health experts never seemed concerned about hantavirus. They are with this. It's appropriate to take their declarations seriously.
> Ebola generally requires contact to spread
"Human infection occurs through close contact with the blood or secretions of infected wildlife, such as bats or non-human primates, and subsequently spreads from person to person through direct contact with the blood, secretions, organs, or other bodily fluids of infected individuals or contaminated surfaces. Transmission is particularly amplified in health-care settings when infection prevention and control (IPC) measures are inadequate, and during unsafe burial practices involving direct contact with the deceased" [1].
So yes on traditional burial. But much easier to spread than HIV.
[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...
We may never know the true origins of Covid-19.
So with asymptomatic spread and a novel virus, it's unlikely that whatever China did actually mattered at all. Once cases reached the US in particular, it was game over. People just can't miss work. There were very few places that maintain zero Covid for any significant period of time (eg Australia) through a combination of luck, geography and extreme quarantine. By geography I mean Australia doesn't have any land borders. And even then it only lasted so long.
Nah, it is one paper, and they only did PCR which is extremely sensitive.
It is more likely that they contaminated their samples than they found COVID viruses. It is still more likely they had false positives.
Also they didn't sequence it. There is no data on where it would be in the genetic tree of coronaviruses.
From the paper: >Moreover, it was circulating in different geographic regions simultaneously
Very very likely to be sample contamination or another winter coronavirus triggering a positive PCR. It just doesn't make any sense.
It was the US Administration and the Republicans that were the dipshits and turned a health situation into politics.
Can you give more info on this? Tried googling it but couldn't find much. I remember there were very strict quarantines, but don't remember reading anything about "killing" people snatched from the street.
Even if optimistically 80% of people do that (in western europe I'd guess it's more like 45%+/-20, might be better elsewhere), if the spreading ability is high (points 1 and 2), you get a bus full of people infected by the two out of ten individuals that decide calling in sick isn't worth it
Technically you can only call in sick when you are literally not able to do your job, and that's not the case if you're just coughing and feel cold or so. Even if your employer might prefer that you don't take the whole team down with you, people's judgement seems to very much be on the "it'll be fine" side. Idk that this is 'the big one' outside of a 2-out-of-100 years pandemic situation where people are exceedingly careful and paranoid
...and even though it was more or less immediately clear it could, the public health authorities dragged their feet admitting it was spreading via airborne transmission (to preserve PPE for healthcare workers), allowing it to get way more out of control than it would have.
Ebola is no laughing matter, it takes cargo planes full of chlorine and plastic sheeting to contain. But it is "easy" to contain if you respect it and do the necessary. And because a big part of "the necessary" is social, and it "luckily" recurs in the same societies, people get better and better at containing it.
Wishing my MSF and WHO friends the best.
This was also quickly found to be false. From memory the spread was 98.8% symptomatic, 1.2% pre-symptomatic, and 0% symptomatic. Granted you can't tell pre-symptomatic from asymptomatic beforehand, but with such a low proportion of infections being in that category it shouldn't have been a concern.
It is a sickness most analogous to the common cold or flu. Both of which suck, both of which you SHOULD self-isolate for, although the conditions, spread and death toll is effectively the same (or lesser) than that of the cold or flu. Which no matter how you spin it, the Global restrictions were too harsh.
We still have people who believe in ivermectin, don't believe in vaccines and somehow still think the vaccine is more dangerous despite there being at least 7 million Covid deaths recorded and, well, 7 million fewer vaccine deaths.
The health and hospital system was in total collapse. The lockdowns helped slow the spread. Were it not for that, many more would've died. Even so, we had not enough ventilators such that doctors and nurses essentially had to choose who lived and who died. The collective trauma on healthcare workers is something we'll be dealing with for years.
What really scares me is how otherwise educated people can fall for the misinformation and absolutely nothing will convince them otherwise. It's basically a mind virus with no cure.
[1]: https://www.kff.org/health-information-trust/covid-19-misinf...
If a virus gets bad enough that the hospitals can't handle the intake and the morgues can't handle the dead, it's serious. I don't see how this is controversial.
I know it was a bad deal for kids and I'm not sure the response was perfect.
On this:
> What really scares me is how otherwise educated people can fall for the misinformation and absolutely nothing will convince them otherwise. It's basically a mind virus with no cure.
Its weird when you think about it in this way, but there's no evolutionary pressure for human beings to either become tame and servile and trusting of authority ("for their own good") or independent tinfoil-clad "freethinkers". We substituted evolutionary pressure that used to come from the environment and hardships of life for media consumption in a way that matchmaking/pair-bonding is done (for example) by what news channel you chose to follow. The search for "actual Truth" (with a big T, as in factual perception of reality) is not necessarily an evolutionary advantage. It can be an ecological hindrance. IMHO, this is downright unsettling.
At the same time, I understand how this type of mystical thinking can come from distrust in authority figures and organizations. For example, I know the approximate distance from the Earth to the moon, except I cannot ever really verify it, therefore I must source this information from third parties, such as Wikipedia. Thing is, I'm comfortable with the fact that the best answer I can give to some questions is "I don't know", but I'm pretty sure that there's no global conspiracy to hide from me the fact that the moon is actually a big piece of cheese.
>However WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed in a statement it "does not meet the criteria of pandemic emergency" and advised countries against closing their borders.
The WHO language is "a public health emergency of international concern," but not "a pandemic emergency."
But I have no clue how far along vaccines are, and even if they exist how feasible it would be to use in e.g Congo. Similar to how we can treat tuberculosis, yet many people keep dying of it.
Unfortunately, the hotbed being Africa makes the situation much worse given historical events - the entire continent has a dark history regarding colonial and modern abuses of power for medical "experiments" [1], and the entire topic resurfaced during the early Covid era [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_experimentation_in_Afr...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/4/8/medical-colonial...
But, we'll just throw that in to the story anyway, even though we have no facts either way.
We don't have a tight chain of causation. But we have plenty of facts pointing entirely one way.
We know there was "a critical four-week detection gap between the onset of symptoms of the presumed index case...and the laboratory confirmation of the outbreak" [1]. This has contributed to "significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread associated with this event at the present time" [2]. And tying all of this back to DOGE, we know USAID's "more than 50 staffers dedicated to outbreak response" were cut to "just six people to handle Ebola, Marburg virus, mpox and bird flu preparedness" [3].
Musk and Trump didn't cause this outbreak. But we would have had a better chance of catching this sooner, and with more precision, if we had those resources there.
[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...
[2] https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-d...
[3] https://www.spyuganda.com/another-one-us-cuts-aid-to-fight-e...
Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern
https://www.who.int/news/item/17-07-2019-ebola-outbreak-in-t...
> 17 July 2019
(people never seem to look for/check dates any more)
> Pursuant to paragraph 2 of Article 12 - Determination of a public health emergency of international concern, including a pandemic emergency of the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR), the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), after having consulted the States Parties where the event is known to be currently occurring, is hereby determining that the Ebola disease caused by Bundibugyo virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), but does not meet the criteria of pandemic emergency, as defined in the IHR.
Why would a search engine turn up a 7 year old reference as the top hit.
Seems like the sort of thing one could end up relying on and dead.
Yeah that was not intentional.
The average commentator on this website, if he or she dies this year, will be more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident or due to the complications of cardiovascular disease, or due to cancer.
If you’re going to spend time worrying, worry about all those things instead. When it comes to infectious diseases, the flu is more likely to kill the people here than hantavirus or Ebola. Make sure to get your flu vaccines.
Adding both those risks together still is a higher risk than before...
2014 was Ebolavirus proper (Zaire, I believe). This outbreak is this fucker of a chimera [1].