Latest Ebola Statistics | Hacker News Reader

Latest Ebola Statistics

ebolastats.info

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Donation pages for Médecins Sans Frontières:

http://www.msf.org.uk/make-a-donation

https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/

I have been posting these two links to quite a few Ebola threads. I am not associated with MSF, I just think it is a very good idea to send them money.

If you are feeling brave and have appropriate medical experience, it would be even better to volunteer with them, as they are more in need of medical staff right now than money.

You can't earmark your donation for Ebola though, but they are spending like 85% of their funds on actual operation costs so you might be sure that your money will help.

On the Canadian donation portal you can select "Ebola response" during your donation submission. That's what I did.

I made a donation of £1k in the middle of last month, when it seemed like MSF was the only organisation doing anything about this. Since then, the WHO and the US Govt look like they pulled their thumbs out of their arses... but they're still taking their sweet time. MSF is on the ground right now.

I run a successful business. If there's one business risk I don't want to deal with, it's a highly contagious haemorrhagic fever spreading through the world like fire through gunpowder.

If you run a business and you want it to continue to grow and exist, donate to MSF. Forget the charity - this is for your own sake.

I know you make it out to be a selfish thing, and while that might be true on some level, it's fundamentally a selfless act. It's actions like these that are the opposite of the tragedy of the commons. If even 10% of people with means acted in a similar way, the world would be a better place in very tangible ways.

Thanks for the suggestion. Wish they took paypal (or amazon or Google wallet), but it's still very much worth doing.

Here's the paypal donation site: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/donate-with-paypal You can look up "doctors without borders" from there.

"CHACE: Doctors Without Borders tried to tell stories like this all summer, but much of the public wasn't listening. The hard thing about raising money for an outbreak is you really need the money at the beginning when the number of cases are small and more manageable. But of course, at the beginning, it's not as dramatic. It's the same problem with the famine."

NPR has a good infographic on the infectiousness of Ebola relative to other agents:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/02/352983774/no-seri...

The problem with averages is they can break down pretty quickly when facing reality. Example from yesterday: I took my kids fishing on a party boat. Lots of kids on the boat. They congregated around the live bait tank. I noticed one kid who was obviously sick. He was coughing constantly all over the place. I watched him cough directly into other kid's faces. And, I am not talking about a gentle cough at all. He coughed on nearly every surface he came into contact with. If this kid was carrying active ebola or something else I would guess twenty to thirty people may have been exposed. I made it a point to have my kids avoid him, yet, in that scenario, there is no way to control exposure. For example, everyone shared one bathroom. With over 50 people onboard, the "about 2" idea is just a suggestion and in two or three weeks it goes exponential.

Yes, I tried to find the irresponsible parent and even asked the captain to make an announcement. He couldn't care less, which further throws off the "about two" rule in the face of reality.

But there's a further difference between the common cold and ebola: a cold spreads through aerosols, so all those kids standing around the sick one are breathing in live virus. Ebola spreads only through infected bodily fluids, so he'd have to be vomiting directly on the other kids for them to catch it. Usually by the time someone is vomiting or bleeding from Ebola, they feel far too sick to go on a fishing trip.

While it's possible that Ebola could mutate and become airborne (this is the plot of the movie Outbreak, after all), scientist believe it pretty unlikely. In humans, it preferentially attacks the gastrointestinal track, and virus loads are pretty low in the respiratory system.

So yes, averages do obscure specific circumstances that affect reality. However, the averages are low because the specific circumstances that would cause high averages are rare.

According to the CDC,

"Although coughing and sneezing are not common symptoms of Ebola, if a symptomatic patient with Ebola coughs or sneezes on someone, and saliva or mucus come into contact with that person’s eyes, nose or mouth, these fluids may transmit the disease."

http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/qas.html

yes, but it doesn't get transmitted through the air. You have to literally sneeze on someone not in their general vicinity

Even if that kid had Ebola (which is not respiratory intensive), the number 'about two' would still hold true on average.

Once the number of ebola patients exceeds the number of beds (which has already happened), won't the growth rate look pretty much linear regardless of the actual numbers?

They should still be handing out kits, so we should know (roughly) which regions and numbers of people with the disease.

I'm sure at this point we also have people checking in, since this is pretty serious.

I would have thought it would look exponential.

That's what I thought too. But the curve is already looking pretty scary.

I'm not sure what to expect - linear, geometric, exponential. What do statistical models of infection normally look like?

Typically any form of population growth can be modeled as exponential. Any type of percentage growth rate is already an exponential since P=P(0)*e^rt in the most simple case.

The main limitations on this would be the carrying capacity of the environment. Or treatment. Carrying capacity would be as if everyone is sick and there are no new hosts or the population has dropped to such levels chance of infection due to contact decreases. And obviously growth rate would also change if the treatment status quo changes

Well if you have the capability to diagnose 500 patients per month, then you are going to be reporting around 500 new infections each month regardless of whether there are 500 or 500,000. Some of the articles from last week made it sound like most of the blood testing labs are already at capacity, which would make these numbers basically meaningless.

Not all patients are diagnosed in hospital.

http://cpid.iri.columbia.edu/ uses statistical models of infection and has predictive capabilities.

Can someone please explain to me the cause of the sudden outbreak? The ebola virus doesn't seem to be that new. Here in an excerpt from a Patent dating back to 2008:

"The family Filoviridae consists of two genera, Marburgvirus and Ebolavirus, which have likely evolved from a common ancestor'. The genus Ebolavirus includes four species: Zaire, Sudan, Reston and Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) ebolaviruses, which have, with the exception of Reston and Cote d'Ivoire ebolaviruses, been associated with large hemorrhagic fever (HF) outbreaks in Africa with high case fatality (53-90%)2."

http://www.google.com/patents/CA2741523A1?cl=en

The other outbreak has been (as far as I understand) in super remote areas where you are not going to infect others.

This one made the leap into the slums.

Would be nice to also see these statistics on a logarithmic plot - the purely selfish concern in the Western world is whether the epidemic is still in unchecked exponential growth, or if the growth rate is slowing.

It's getting the stats from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_epidemic_in_West_Af... There's a log plot on that page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Evolution_of_the_2014_Ebol...

Here's another visualisation I put together, based on the same data collected on Wikipedia. It tries to mix a narrative with the growing number of cases/deaths.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-31/ebola-timeline-deadlie...

Nice. I placed a link to New: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8415886

Hans Rosling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVZNGGxdxJQ) had the spread at 1.7 per infection at the 29th, last I heard it was 2, but that may be a rounding of the previous number.

Here is a dataset on Github https://github.com/jf22/ZEBOV-2013-WAfrica-data/blob/master/...

And corresponding visualization https://my.infocaptor.com/dash/i.php?viz=njendjlm&mode=embed

Is the graph cumulative or showing the number of people who are currently being treated for Ebola?

Correct. There are about 3300 reported deaths: http://healthmap.org/ebola/#timeline

Must not ignore the footnote:

"WHO has stated the reported numbers "vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak", saying there may be 2.5 times as many cases as officially reported [Reuters]. Cases in remote areas may also be missed."

My math is a little rusty but that reminds me of e^x.

You're not far off. Not an epidemiologist, but I think these sorts of things generally follow a logistic (S-shaped or sigmoid) curve (1/1+e^-x). Initial growth is approximately exponential, then you hit a point of saturation, growth slows, and eventually levels off.

The key question is how long does it take for it to level of?

Right now it its infecting 1.7 persons per infected person (avg) so it is still growing, however it is also in the slums of the poorest area on earth.

Anyone is free to use this donation poster to bring awareness. http://bit.ly/1vF1COO

Looks like Startup Growth

In this case I would really appreciate it having an exit and killing the product.

The real question is who can you convince to make it a talent acquisition?

not my startup

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