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Comment by christkv | Hacker News Reader

You are only infectious during illness and it requires contact with fluids. It's exasperated by local funeral rituals where people interact with the dead body and get infected.

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"relatives slept in the same room as the body, stayed beside it continuously, or had direct physical contact during overnight mourning."

I’ll do my best to avoid the overnight cuddle vigil with an Ebola corpse.

This is a great example of how some cultures are better than others.

This makes the recent burning of ebola clinic tents by angry relatives make more sense.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ebola-tent-fire-congo-9.721000...

I wonder if you have sources on this? I heard that this is a new variant that has a much longer incubation time. A longer time until symptoms appear means it will spread much quicker and wider (that was also the issue with Covid that had a incubation time of 5 - 8 days).

This variant may have longer incubation time but you are almost not infectious without symptoms. The more symptomatic you become, the more you spread. This is in contrast to COVID or some flus where you are most infectious in the incubation period.

Sure https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4456362/ it outlines history and spread. incubation period is long but there is no asymptomatic transmission that is known.

The "coughing up blood" symptom can cause you to come into contact with fluids involuntarily.

Avoid anybody who is coughing up blood. Noted.

I tend to do this naturally. Even people who sound like they might cough up blood.

The problem is that the ill people need water and food to have some chance to survive. Think of the nurses!

sure but's not flu or covid in ability to spread.

Exacerbated*, however it surely is exasperating how poorly this is being handled.

Do you know how big this area is and how difficult it is?

So your claim is this won't be an issue for the rest of the world? What are the underlying implications from your statement?

That it does not spread that easily and that its current spread is more a combination of factors in the specific area. War, hunger, refugees, culture and lack of education. It’s to say it’s hard for it to land and expand. Once you have symptoms the patient is also very quickly immobilized reducing the spread further.

0% chance this spreads rapidly in the first world.

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