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Comment by k_kelly | Hacker News Reader

Ebola is actually too aggressive. It tends to kill and incapacitate people so quickly that they don't have time to spread it to others.

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People keep repeating this, but it isn't true. Ebola has an incubation period which can be longer than two weeks, and the disease can be transmitted during the incubation period. This is more than enough time to transmit the disease to more than one other person in a dense population.

The biggest reason we haven't seen larger-scale outbreaks of EVD/EHF is that previous outbreaks have been in geographically remote areas, and that doctors are stomping on it with full force whenever an outbreak occurs. The outbreak going on right now disproves the theory that Ebola just burns itself out quickly.

Indeed. "Stochastic extinction and skilled epidemiologists and clinicians" are vastly more likely explanations than "It's just so good at killing people".

That explanation just has way better press.

So it should devolve its lethal symptoms until it spreads to Greenland and Madagascar.

let me guess, you got this from playing Plague Inc. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miniclip.p...) on your phone, right? ...the game is so unrealistic that it almost annoyed me to the point of motivating me to write a competing more realistic game ...but then I realized that "more realistic" would be too detrimental to the gameplay for it to be enjoyable :)

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