Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo | Hacker News Reader

Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo

afro.who.int

132 pointssimonebrunozzi73 comments

(Originally posted as a reply to a dead comment)

While there was some controversy regarding how COVID spreads in the early days (droplets vs aerosol, how many virions you needed to be exposed to to become infected, whether asymptomatic transmission was possible, etc.), most of the details were fairly well understood within a year after the pandemic started. Plus, we were already aware that coronaviruses are capable of spreading via the air and causing mass outbreaks [0], so even at the very beginning I doubt that many experts would have claimed that it was impossible for COVID-19 to cause a pandemic.

However, Ebola has been around for 50 years now [1], so we have a pretty good idea how it works. And every source that I've read says that it spreads exclusively through direct fluid contact with someone who is symptomatic [2] [3] [4] [5], and so does every other virus in the same family [6], so it seems almost impossible for Ebola to cause the same type of worldwide outbreak that COVID-19 did.

(I'm not claiming that Ebola will never spread to North America/Europe, or that an outbreak won't spread to and kill lots of people in Africa, just that it should spread much slower than COVID-19 and that it should be much easier to prevent its transmission.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbrea...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola#History

[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/causes/index.html#heading-xkphh2xy...

[3]: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ebola-disea...

[4]: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2026/05/18/what-is-ebola-and-how-d...

[5]: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/ebo...

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filoviridae

No one worth listening to is claiming that there will be a COVID-style pandemic. The concern here is the very high mortality rate. Granted the transmission rate is low, but in countries where facilities and health-care workers are scarce this disease is still capable of being a real problem.

Well they did just say it was in reply to a dead comment, so I suspect that was one person entertaining the possibility of widespread transmission, and there's already at least one more comment here if not two (depending how you interpret them) entertaining the possibility of mutation that leads to easier transmission.

Maybe the "worth listening to" caveat is intending to dismiss those, but I certainly don't think it's the case that nobody is suggesting it or that it's not worth pushing back against.

> No one worth listening to is claiming that there will be a COVID-style pandemic.

When I first posted this, all 4 top-level comments were dead, and half of them suggested that this Ebola outbreak would be similar to COVID-19. I agree that they're probably not worth listening to, but I still think that it's worth refuting them, since the media is generally not doing a great job explaining how Ebola is different from COVID-19.

> The concern here is the very high mortality rate.

Oh yeah, I definitely agree that this is concerning, but concerning in the sense that something absolutely horrible is happening in the world, and not in the sense that I could wake up tomorrow sick with Ebola (like some other comments were implying).

this is more of a curiosity and not pushback but are there mechanistic reasons why viral mutations are subjected to tradeoffs in terms of lethality vs infectiousness? is it that the more lethal it is, the earlier it is that people become symptomatic (and thus are far more likely to isolate and/or be immobile)?

The faster you kill your host, the less time you have to infect new hosts. Sure, you can loot the host to make a lot of new viruses, but when the host dies, they die too. Ideally, a virus "wants" to make the host live a long, gregarious life, touring the world and kissing babies. But that takes energy away from making more viral payload, so yeah, it's a tradeoff.

> energy

That is almost irrelevant.

Our immune systems, and environments are mostly security-by-obscurity.

Viruses randomly mutate to find vulnerabilities.

Their biggest issue is finding solutions using a genetic optimisation algorithm.

Their biggest strength is that it is a massively parallel search. Think of 10^x monkeys bashing at all points in their reproduction (maybe 10^18 for peak covid in human hosts).

Viruses don't reproduce by mutation, they reproduce by getting the host to manufacture more copies of the virus, which takes resources (which ultimately come down to energy) away from the host.

The "monkeys" aren't trying huge numbers of variations, they are making huge numbers of identical copies with very rare (and usually non-functional) variations when they fail to copy exactly.

The survivorship bias is strong in you.

You're ignoring unsuccessful mutations... But those are the chaos monkeys that really matter!! "on the order of 10¹⁷–10¹⁹ individual nucleotide mutations per month". In part because infectious virions are far fewer than total viral RNA copies.

Which ends up with 2-3 mutations per month in the successful lineage. That's the "rare" number you're thinking of, but mutations are extremely common (as anyone with cancer finds out).

Your "energy" point is just plain wrong. You might carry 100ug of virus when infected - a tiny proportion of your weight. Total mass of virions in humanity at peak might have been 10kg.

See "The total number and mass of SARS-CoV-2 virions" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7685332/

I suspect you aren't reading well. I said:

> ...they are making huge numbers of identical copies with very rare (and usually non-functional) variations...

to which you replied:

> You're ignoring unsuccessful mutations...

You are also conflating absolute numbers with likelihoods; flipping two dozen heads in a row is a rare occurrence (1:2⁻²⁴). Saying that "if everyone on Earth tried it today we'd expect it to happen ~500 times" is not a counter argument.

You're also conflating the substitution rate (rate of mutation rate accumulation in the viral gene pool) with the frequency of copying errors (your "chaos monkeys" metaphor, to which I'm objecting).

Your objection to my statement that viral reproduction consumes resources from the host (which I shorthanded as "energy" since all cellular resources ultimately depend on this) is nonsensical. Who cares about the mass of the viruses?

That's like disputing the claim that "the vandals caused $3 million in property damage" by saying "but they only had $273.15 with them". It's completely irrelevant.

I don't think it's really a tradeoff and rather that Ebola is simply bad at its job. Why? Because it's primarily a bat virus (and it's basically asymptomatic in bats) that ended up where it doesn't belong and wreaks havoc because it hasn't learned to play nice.

In bats, it reproduces more slowly, doesn't kill the hosts, and thus the hosts live to spread it.

This is exactly the tradeoff I described.

"No one worth listening to is claiming that there will be a COVID-style pandemic." That means exactly that. The war(s) were not enough and run out of steam. We need the next thing.

Note to self and others who have read Richard Preston's "Hot Zone": The 1989 Reston (US) incident was NOT caused by a single-base mutation of Ebola, but by a distinct monkey virus. Preston seems to have made that up to dramatize events.

I read that book when I was probably way too young for it, and that incident made me spend a lot of time staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night. I'll have to dig into it more!

The caveats to your comment are in my opinion as follows: Bundibugyo the current strain has not previously been responsible for material outbreaks, as such it has therefore received significantly less scientific attention.

Additionally Ebola (Zaire) has previously been shown to be potentially spread via aerosols. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00811, the CDC and associated institutions resolutely claim this is not possible, yet also insist on full respirator PPE. For any institution to claim we know much about this strain isnt true. An alarming fact to update ones prior is the current size of the outbreak and its rapid development compared to ALL previous outbreaks (yes conditions on the ground maybe confounding this), but the scientific approach would be to say, we simply do not have enough evidence to make any claims of significance.

I am quite worried about the potential for this situation in the DRC (a country of ~116m people, ~55% rural) to 1) not burn itself out, 2) act as a smouldering viral reservoir where occasional spillovers occur to the western hemisphere.

2) Is interesting politically for Western countries, because even if a mass pandemic DOES NOT occur (this is my base case), the pressure of containing a handful of regularly appearing and likely high profile Ebola cases by public health authorities will be acutely felt politically and socially. It is very possible some sorts of lockdowns are implemented. Yes vaccines are in development, yes rapid antigen testing is possible. But this is no Covid, 50%+ CFR is a totally different beast! I think this is potentially close to some sort of worst case scenario from a social and political perspective even if the public health impact IS limited.

> Additionally Ebola (Zaire) has previously been shown to be potentially spread via aerosols. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00811

Ah, I was not aware of this, so thanks for pointing that out. That does indeed look quite concerning, so let's hope that that won't apply to humans (although I'm struggling to think of a plausible biological reason for why it wouldn't).

> I am quite worried about the potential for this situation in the DRC (a country of ~116m people, ~55% rural) to 1) not burn itself out, 2) act as a smouldering viral reservoir where occasional spillovers occur to the western hemisphere.

I agree that this is bad in the sense that something absolutely horrific is happening to a lot of people; I was just trying to refute the point that we could also somehow wake up with Ebola a month from now.

Doesn't Ebola kill faster than transmission can be maximized? I believe Nipah in Asia also faces the same "issue".

In general the more severe a virus the less likely it is to spread into a pandemic. This is for a couple reasons: 1) really sick people are less likely to go spread it, 2) really sick people are easier to identify and isolate and 3) the time between virus shedding and death is very small.

There are, of course, some exceptions (long incubation periods where you can shed virus but are totally asymptomatic) but those are rare and usually self limiting in some other factor. Smallpox was really the worst possible case and we have thankfully eliminated it.

Big deadly pandemics (black plague level) are usually bacteria.

>Big deadly pandemics (black plague level) are usually bacteria.

that's not really true, is it? I'm thinking small pox and influenza are big ones with well-studied pandemics that had fairly high mortality rates

> Additionally Ebola (Zaire) has previously been shown to be potentially spread via aerosols.

…between inoculated pigs and monkeys, in a lab. Pigs infected with this strain, quite notably, do not become hemorrhagic, and as the article notes, manifest as a respiratory illness. So it isn’t fair to point at it and draw conclusions about humans.

Moreover, from the article:

”We have also never observed transmission of EBOV from infected to naive macaques, including in an experiment employing the same cage setting as in the current study, where three NHPs intramuscularly inoculated with EBOV did not transmit the virus to one naive NHP for 28 days, the duration of the protocol.”

They’re literally telling you that the thing you’re fear-mongering about was tested for, and not found to exist.

> the CDC and associated institutions resolutely claim this is not possible, yet also insist on full respirator PPE.

…for people working with late stage infections, in close quarters. Usually with many such cases. This is a case where “better safe than sorry” applies.

> It is very possible some sorts of lockdowns are implemented.

What drives me nuts, and the same thing happened with Covid, is all the things you mentioned are true and yet western countries don't even entertain the possibility of preemptively denying travel from these countries until things get under control. I think the US, Europe, etc. will manage to survive without travel from the DRC et al for an extended period of time. But will governments actually do it? Nah...

The US has travel restrictions, therefore you are incorrect that "western countries don't even entertain the possibility of preemptively denying travel from these countries until things get under control"

https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/situation-summary/returning-travel...

OK, guess I missed that one. Score a point for mean ol' Trump I guess.

But, you're ignoring that it's also not exactly a blanket ban on travel from the DRC, just "within the last 21 days", which... does that make a meaningful difference? And, where are the other western countries doing the same? Kinda my point. If it's done at all, it's a day late and a dollar short.

I believe that Ebola will kill you a lot faster than 21 days. It's not going to be latent in you for that long.

[Edit: Arodex notes that it can remain dormant for years (at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49418182). So, yes, someone could bring it back. It probably wouldn't be an active infection, though. But what is the alternative? Nobody who ever visits the DRC can enter the US ever again? That seems like overkill.]

> But, you're ignoring that it's also not exactly a blanket ban on travel from the DRC, just "within the last 21 days", which... does that make a meaningful difference?

What's the alternative here though? It's not really okay to lock your own citizens out of the country indefinitely, so there has to be some way for people to be able to come back home eventually. Requiring an Ebola test on entry would be one option, but those Ebola tests would probably be better used on patients in Africa, so it would be hard to defend such a policy from an allocation of resources perspective.

Ebola is known for 50 years, and yet we still discover new facts about it, thanks to PCR and genetic analysis.

It was only in 2021 that we discovered that ebola can remain dormant for years in former patients and restart infecting:

https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/w3ct1yvq

True right now, but what happens if it mutates?

A few thousand is nowhere close to pandemic but it's enough to give the virus many opportunities to evolve against its new environment.

On the plus side, most viruses become less deadly as they adapt to their host. COVID luckily did this, it seems. If Ebola does this it'll become like the flu, but we don't want yet another flu-level disease circulating.

> True right now, but what happens if it mutates?

There are more than a dozen viruses in the same family as Ebola, each of which have various strains, and none of them have airborne spread. Also, this family has been around for over 1k years [0], and any mutation allowing for airborne spread would be heavily selected for, which suggests that it's probably not "easy" (in the sense that it would only require a very small number of mutations) for the virus to acquire this trait.

That being said, evolution is messy and probabilistic, so it's certainly possible for this to happen (especially considering the high AIDS prevalence in Africa, which increases the risk of recombination), but the odds of this are so low that I wouldn't worry about it. Another novel coronavirus or influenza strain would probably be my biggest worry.

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9151191/

There's a genetic continent between hemorrhagic fever and coronavirus, and I'd be far more worried about something like MERS or another already-respiratory virus breaking out than Ebola.

One big risk with Ebola is how the dead are handled in some parts of Africa. I understand the dead are cared for at home by family members which increases the risk of exposure. In western countries, death care is far more formalized with exposure protections, so Ebola is much less likely to spread as it does in other countries without that formalized care.

Before COVID, I had thought that bushmeat [1] could be the route that spread Ebola to Europe, people smuggle it in their luggage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmeat

Were it to spread to Europe, I imagine contact tracing and societal norms would result in a drastically lower r naught and basically make community spread a non-factor.

Europeans (at least European health authorities) would hopefully cut down on funeral activities like touching and kissing the bodies of Ebola victims, caring for relatives at home without PPE and sanitation, etc.

African countries face challenges with fighting Ebola, but they sure do make things even harder for themselves with certain practices that are pretty rough even through 19th century germ theory lens.

>Were it to spread to Europe, I imagine contact tracing and societal norms would result in a drastically lower r naught and basically make community spread a non-factor.

It depends where in Europe. COVID created or revealed a crazy underbelly in a significant part of the population. And I don't see hospitals keeping up well with an influx of patients requiring very strict isolation protocols against any symptom of bleeding (and there are more people having abnormal bleeding than one imagines, especially with the aging of the population. Now imagine every one of them is a maximum level alarm).

And despite the idea that public health is weak in Africa, African doctors and nurses are better trained and efficient against epidemics that their European counterparts.

> people smuggle it in their luggage

Really?

Yeah. There's a reason why customs is so strict about the sloppy importation of food: it's host to diseases and pests, capable of causing ridiculous damage because someone has to have that "taste of home".

It’s the fact or otherwise of someone having carried raw meat in their luggage that I’m questioning, not the fact of customs officials caring about food moving across international borders. I’ve had fruit confiscated at a border, but meat in luggage seems like… a different paradigm.

Unrefrigerated and in a suitcase is somehow the least-bad part about bushmeat.

If you packed it with an ice pack and dry ice to keep that pack cool, it could remain about frozen for the flight.

Usually that "taste of home" is part of a cultural ritual or folk medicine which is why you have these high risk smuggling issues. For them, it's a need, not a want.

Which reminds me of being at the SFO baggage claim. A security dog went straight for a person's bag. The security officer opened it up and found an old, stale sandwich. The person said they had forgotten their mother had stashed it there.

Viral transmission.... Can change........

Despite the supposed "knowledge of how COVID spreads" the following did not happen during covid:

1. Mass movement of classrooms/education to the outdoors in climates where this was possible, despite the outdoors being an excellent way to reduce exposure to an airborne pathogen.

2. Mass campaigns to deploy air purification devices/filtration and modernize existing HVAC. Air quality is often garbage anyway indoors because of bad hygiene from people and natural pollutants. Slapping an air filter to a box fan is an extremely cheap and effective (if loud) solution!!!! We had no excuses for not having government money spent here. It'd also make these stupid wildfires much easier for most to deal with, and as a bonus reduce every respitory related negative externality there is.

3. Educating people that something as simple as cracking/opening your windows while driving is effective at circulating air such that you can massively reduce your chance of transmitting COVID.

But what did we get instead? Masking mandates - leading to a massive amount of physical pollution in landfills, political radicalization against left-wing movements, a whole lot of annoyed glasses wearers, etc. Lots of cloth masks which ultimately worked poorly and lead to economic boom-bust cycles in a core medical commodity in an already fucked supply chain. Lots of fake N-95s, leading to worse QC across the industry which still plagues it today.

We also got insane "6 feet" requirements that did nothing to rescue people from extremely poorly ventilated/purified environments which made mass spread of the virus in places like schools inevitable.

I will never forgive the public for how stupid they are when it comes to anything involving air quality. We have learned basically nothing except about mRNA (which is awesome) and about how much we hated democracy from the stupid boomer flu.

P.S: Bonus, the fact that Americans don't wash their assholes after using the bathroom (no bidet culture like in Asia) means that we unironically are spreading it all anyway by being around others indoors:

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/feces-covid-1...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7464151/

America should have had a mass campaign to put bidets on every toilet nation wide in the 50s. Let's do it now.

are you claiming that people who have a smelly asshole are spreading it that way? I think it’s more around if there’s feces on the hands, but wiping your ass and washing your hands afterwards shouldn’t be a problem.

There's a Bayesian forecast from some folks at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that's useful to see if the outbreak has reached peak size: https://epiforecasts.io/BVDOutbreakSize/stable/analysis#Summ...

The last update finally had a growth rate confidence interval straggling 0, meaning the peak seems to be within reach: "The latest growth rate is estimated to be 30% -0.005–0.008"

There's a nice figure showing Rt over time: https://epiforecasts.io/BVDOutbreakSize/stable/analysis#Repr...

Newest run from 2026-08-25 shows Rt likely above 1 again unfortunately (percentages are confidence intervals): 30% 1.05–1.19, 60% 0.99–1.31, 90% 0.82–1.6. Daily growth rate: 30% 0.005–0.014, 60% -0.001–0.021, 90% -0.013–0.034 per day.

The documentary on the last outbreak remain relevant to this day, the causes are still local hygiene practices, and this will not be solved by dropping in medical teams and hospitals and the WHO holding conferences and getting more money.

What solved this last time was the local population learning the importance of washing ones hands

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG1aY5OOR2o

Today 300 died from ebola in Congo according to news reports.

Here is what my friend related to me about respiratory troubles in Africa.

There is a class of poachers, or claim-jumpers as it were, who illegally glean from mines. They do this primarily by scraping and abrading the walls and gleaning the powder or dust that comes off into ores.

Now since this is illegal activity, it's done on the downlow, and obviously it's done by quite poor people without sufficient PPE. So they don't go in there with respirators and masks and HEPA filters. They may have a cloth over their mouth as they scrape over the walls and kick up an underground storm of dust in the dimly lit caverns.

So of course, this dust contains hazardous materials, especially arsenic and other nasty stuff. And the gleaners tend to come down with respiratory ailments. You'd get a chronic cough, shortness of breath, sore throat, and ultimately, coughing up blood. You'd be prone to secondary respiratory infections along the way.

Now if you're a poacher and you get seen in a hospital or clinic, you won't admit that you're conducting illicit activities in mines. That would be rather foolish to out yourself. So you lie to the physicians, and you don't really know how your lungs got this way: must be voodoo, or a witch doctor or curse or something.

So it seems that a lot of allegedly Ebola cases get assigned to these poachers who won't admit that they inhaled arsenic, basically, chronically over the years they've been sneaking into mines at night. But the Ebola bugaboo is powerful, and ubiquitous, and easy to diagnose at arm's length, so basically anyone who comes in presenting with respiratory distress, they're going to pin Ebola on them without a second thought.

I don't know if the foregoing is plausible or true, but I'm just saying, it's not far-fetched based on what I know of medicine the way it is in 2026, and it sure would be a shame if a whole region is getting it all wrong because large gangs of thieves won't own up to their own wrongdoings.

I chide the people in Africa for not following up on best health practices as far as Ebola victims are concerned. It seems there's a ritualistic need for people in Africa to touch and kiss the deceased before they're buried. This is a bad idea as far as Ebola is concerned. There've even been cases where family members attacked UN hospitals to remove their loved ones remains, perpetuating the spread of the disease.

A couple hundred years ago they didn't know any better so you could forgive them. But these days we do know better and to still insist on rituals that lead to the spreading of Ebola is just plain dumb.

As far as I'm concerned there should be stronger travel restrictions for people from Africa, especially the ones near the Ebola outbreak.

People on the street, so to speak, don't know better even in advanced nations with strong educational systems. Look how much rejection of vaccination there is in spite of "knowing better". In many African nations there is very reasonable suspicion of European authorities - as there is a long history of abuse and degradation that has moreover been weaponized politically kn the post colonial era. The solution is trustworthy and pedagogical people on the ground doing a lot of hard work and that requires lots of institutional support.

By insisting on these rituals there will be a permanent, low-level Ebola epidemic which could spread outwards quickly if the conditions become favorable. Even in Africa people are becoming more mobile making the spread of the disease a real possibility.

At the moment Ebola isn't a severe threat because of the fast incubation and mortality, but if it does become more widespread governments should claim the bodies of the victims and burn them in a large firepit.

> But these days we do know better and to still insist on rituals that lead to the spreading ...

Thus explaining why RFK has his current position.

>I chide the people in Africa for not following up on best health practices as far as Ebola victims are concerned

God, how can you say that with a straight face after the "ritualistic" response people in the West had during COVID? Fighting against wearing masks, having their mind break because they couldn't go drink in bars, going crazy for snake oil solutions and destroying public health care.

We have had in almost every western country politicians and executives asking to lift any restrictions "because we all die one day anyway, we shouldn't be afraid, get back to work".

I think that what happened with Covid was the big gap between the very strict measures enacted and the perceived risk.

When people think "it's just the flu" it's easy to become defiant.

On the other hand, Ebola has a known fatality rate of 50%+ and so refusing to follow best practices is plain suicidal.

Also events like Partygate in the UK really didn't help, people were already pretty done with the pandemic lifestyle after nearly two years of it on and off including fairly heavy-handed enforcement; the British government then lost all its practical moral authority to impose restrictions when it became clear the very people imposing them had been having massive boozy parties throughout the worst parts of the pandemic. That more than anything was the final nail in the coffin for things like mandatory masking and the 'rule of six' from what I remember.

I wish that public leaders realised just how much their personal moral fibre determines what people in general will and won't tolerate. The public trust they cheerfully destroy in minutes takes decades to rebuild, and I'm genuinely worried that if there's a pandemic with this still in the majority of people's memory they will go 'so you're going to put us under house arrest and have massive parties again? Why should we listen to you?' and it'll be a very difficult question to answer.

Well for Covid it became clear that the risk was indeed quite low if you were not elderly or with an underlying condition while the restrictions were drastic and poorly targeted: Young people suffered a lot even when Covid was really no worse than the flu to them (and most people). Countries like Sweden that didn't go into lockdown also proved that strict restrictions were over the top.

Now, again Ebola is very seriously deadly so it does not make sense to compare people refusing to follow Covid restrictions then to people refusing to follow Ebola best practices now.

>Now, again Ebola is very seriously deadly

Says who? Bunch of 'experts', I'd wager. We've 'ad enough of their rubbish.

Sweden, you mean the country with the highest level of single-occupancy housing, and universal health care?

Maybe they don't perceive the risk to be high, just like during covid the Westerners refusing to social distance or get vaccinated perceived the risk to be low. Let's not pretend that either group is carefully assessing the epidemiology.

Plus vaccines now

I get the feeling the reason this is out of control is the political climate, at one point in time, a good US president or EU council would've sent aid, doctors, equipment, etc to help tackle this, now everyone is so broke (allegedly) and angry that it's just political suicide to say you're sending money to help "foreigners" in Africa.

The face of rich people and philanthropy has changed too. The billionaires (and nearly trillionaires?) don't need to pretend to care anymore. They have a moat right now where it's fine to be hoarding all the money while thousands die from something which we could stop if the resources and political clout was available to help.

China was entering into this space but seems not to be helping now either, I guess because the west isn't helping, they don't need to pretend anymore that they're the good guys.

Obviously, it's the right thing to do is help, even if just for selfish reasons, ie we don't want this thing in other countries, but you cannot do that anymore because it's just political suicide to do so.

For those that don't recall or weren't around the Obama administration send thousands of medical and military to assist with the 2013-2016 outbreak. A big part of what they did was construct medical wards, but they helped with treatment, PPE, testing infrastructure, etc.

That outbreak had 11K dead and things were on the verge of being a lot worse. There were beginning to be neighborhood level lockdowns to prevent spread and civil unrest. Its difficult to play what-if games but it certainly was a very serious situation.

From what I've heard this outbreak is spreading faster than that one at the same stage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_African_Ebola_epidemic

How many decades have we been helping Africa for, and for what?

It went, primarily, to their politicians and warlords. The West needs to face the fact that we aren’t the world’s savior, and fixing other countries problems is not our job.

When Ebola is eating your face you will find out for what.

Africa might be the least fortunate people but you don't get a pass for ignoring that and not helping, we're all in this together, like it or not.

To prevent countless thousands of easily preventable deaths. Human problems don't just stop at some point, especially in poor areas that are also getting hit the hardest by climate change. Are you also upset that western countries have been giving their poorest citizens food for decades?

Such a bad take. Africa was still mostly colonies until the mid 20th century. And today, it's ruled by corrupt dictators that the North ensures stay in place so they can bribe their ways to getting concessions, to extract resources and cheap labor.

Looking at import/export and capital flows, any "helping" we did was nothing but the barest of compensation for the ongoing massive theft of Africa's wealth.

Why ever help people in need?

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