Ebola. Why worry? Heres why. It currently has about 5000(?) cases in Africa. The WHO says that the number of cases are doubling about every 3 weeks. If you think that isnt an emergency, let me help you. Doubling from 1000 cases to 2000 takes 3 weeks. 1000 to 4000 cases takes 6 weeks. 10 doublings is a factor of 2^10 or 1024. So in 10*3=30 weeks (two school semesters or about 7 months), there will be 1 million cases. In another 30 weeks after that (about a year from now) we could have 1000 times more cases, or a billion people sick with ebola. Hopefully it wont go that far or remain at that pace. You might think that it is currently more out of control because it is in Africa, and that is a fair point. But in mathematical studies of viral diseases as well as hypothetical zombie invasions, the ultimate outcome doesnt matter if you start with slow zombies or fast ones. Once there are a lot of sick people, the health care system can and will break and the disease will spread everywhere. So when should you decide to do something? When there are a million cases and it is spreading to Asia and Latin America with cases appearing in Europe and the US? Or do you attack it when there are only thousands of cases and it is merely a super challenging task to stop it. Sending our military for technical and engineering support makes excellent sense. I actually think they should assess the situation and then send more. We are literally saving the world with this one, us included. who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs103/en/
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 01:31:03 +0000
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