Comment by cmrivers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrivers | Hacker News Reader

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I think this challenge has the potential to be useful. We launched a similar effort last week geared more as a hackathon [0], and we have some really interesting projects in the works. Even just simple visualization and analysis of the data hasn't really been done yet, but there are a lot of insights that can be pulled out [1, 2]. Similar civic hacking projects were launched during Hurricane Sandy, and some useful things came out of it [3].

This outbreak really is one of the greatest public health disasters of modern times. I encourage you to think about how you might help, beyond donating money.

[0] https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/computing-for-ebola-...

[1] Data available for download: https://github.com/cmrivers/ebola

[2] Examples of ebola analyses: http://www.caitlinrivers.com/blog/category/ebola

[3] https://civic.mit.edu/blog/hidenise/hurricanehackers-project...

I encourage you to think about how you might help, beyond donating money.

While thinking about this is a laudable idea, I encourage everyone to donate money first, right now, since odds are it's by far the most effective thing you will be able to do.

>While thinking about this is a laudable idea, I encourage everyone to donate money first, right now, since odds are it's by far the most effective thing you will be able to do.

I have donated money, but I now think this is distracting us from what is really needed. No amount of money poured into any NGO will allow us to get on top of this outbreak. Even with tens of billions of dollars a NGO like MSF is not going to be able to put in place the required treatment facilities needed, nor have the authority or ability to enforce an effective quarantine. We should be putting all our efforts into lobbying the US government into getting the required UN security council authority to act and activating the full scale mobilisation of the USA military. This is as about as serious as anything gets.

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