Ebola in West Africa has killed 55 percent of the health care workers it has infected. (Percentage may be higher if burial teams are included.) Because Ebola medics almost always wear some protective gear, the 55 percent mortality is ominous. Medics have close association with patients and hospitals, clinics, and treatment centers are hubs of Ebola contagion, and may actually boost death rates, but still, the medics are protecting themselves to some extent and following recommendations of WHO and CDC on how to handle the patients as safely as possible. Regular citizens in West Africa are not kept track of very well, compared to all the medics. Certainly stats for doctors and nurses are kept quite accurate and up to date. Regular folk may travel, even internationally, if they have enough money or funds sent from relatives, and when regular folk die, they may be secretly buried. So this means that the numbers of people dying outside the medical system and uncounted, are almost all regular citizens rather than medics. Regular citizens who are sick are often avoiding hospitals and clinics, and may be treated by some family members and kept away from the public when sick, but the contagion must be greater for the nonmedical people because they tend to have minimal or no protection from the virus while helping family members, and when the burials are done. Secret family burials, traditional burials etc. would drive the contagion rate higher. So, the cases/deaths and contagion rates for nonmedical people must be quite a bit greater than it is for the medics. Specifically, the death rate must be greater. Greater than 55 percent. So numbers showing a death rate for nonmedics in West Africa in the Ebola areas, if the death rate is under 55 percent of the exposed Ebola patients, must be wrong. It can be assumed that unprotected people will die at a greater rate than the protected medics. I think that is a logical assumption because most factors point that way. Okay, now consider that estimates of about 21,000 cases and 8000 deaths in West Africa (primarily) have occurred. The death rate is about 38 percent. This must be incorrect. It means that the deaths are undercounted, as we would expect if some people are hiding out in the bush or being helped and hidden by family members. We know this is happening anyway, so the 8,000 number is too low. 55 percent of 21,000 would be 11,550 deaths, but heres the kicker: We know of a certainty that 55 percent death rate is much too low. (because thats the rate for relatively well protected medics--even though they are exposed to more ebola, the Ebola deaths as a fraction of Ebola cases is the issue here, so the exposure likelihood is not a factor(?) or not as much of a factor. We could double the cases, and double the deaths, and then, we would still have the same problem of having 38 percent deaths among the less protected members of the public. In actual fact, the deaths percentage must be well over 55 percent among nonmedics. Suppose it is 80 percent. That would be 80 percent of the doubled case number, or 80 percent of about 42,000, or 33,600 Ebola deaths (cumulative) through the past year. That seems like a high number. It could be more like 70 percent. But for now, suppose thats the deaths count. Then, remaining aboveground of the 42,000 cases, we would still have 42,000 - 33,600 or 8,400 cases remaining aboveground. Now, from hospital admissions, and survivors still aboveground in West Africa, we can estimate that of these 8,400 still alive Ebola patients, some number is in treatment or has been released to be monitored at home after surviving Ebola. Those treated numbers are available. Then the remainder would be still out there, hidden and still surviving, or dead. This shows that for a more severe outbreak and pandemic, the aboveground numbers are not very large; and in fact, for a less severe outbreak with lower mortality rate, somewhere between 55 percent and 80 percent, the survivors numbers would be higher, and could make the outbreak/pandemic seem worse, not better. This means that one sign of a very severe epidemic will be the lack of survivors needing assistance, because of the more thorough death rate. This means that when the epidemic seems to be less and less of a problem, it is possibly because it is more and more dangerous and is killing more and more thoroughly, and possibly faster as well.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 02:34:19 +0000
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