Posted on 08/17/2014 6:03:15 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
MONROVIA, Liberia — This morning Makasha Kroma shivered with fever. Her head still hurt; that hadn’t gone away. And she was vomiting a lot.
That’s why she’d ended up here, at a holding center where people suspected to have Ebola wait, in a dark classroom, for the results of their tests. These things — headache, fever, vomiting — are the early signs.
Ebola is transmitted through bodily fluids. It has no treatment, besides hydration, no cure, no proven vaccine. Since February, it’s ravaged West Africa, infecting more than 2,000 people in four countries and killing more than 1,100.
Kroma came to the West Point holding center with her sister, her three children, a cousin named Bindu, and two other family members. They are all women, or girls — most caregivers in Liberia are — and they washed Kroma’s clothes, fed her rice, wiped down her body, and cleaned up her vomit with a rag and some chlorine.
Those are the kinds of chores that give you Ebola. And the girls had no gloves. All the gloves the Ministry of Health brought this place when it opened yesterday, all 150 of them, were gone by the middle of the night.
That’s when three people escaped. Because Sam Tarplah and his staff didn’t have any gloves, they couldn’t restrain the patients who wanted to flee. They could only plead. “We begged them, told them people are coming tomorrow to help you,” Tarplah said. “But there was no way we could fight them.”
Two escaped by climbing the back wall, according to health care workers in a clinic next door. Another, a woman with five children, simply took off, Tarplah said.
(Excerpt) Read more at buzzfeed.com ...
Mob destroys parts of Ferguson the day after mb dies. Hmmm. Same reaction, different location.
From what I understand, the people believe that their President is making up this Ebola stuff so the country will take in foreign aid money. I guess that’s feasible, but it’s a rather large risk to take if you’re wrong about it.
I’d hate to have chills and headache from the flu and get stuck in the Ebola center waiting for test results.
Lord, have mercy.
CH: I tried using the best data I could find from the CDC website to track the rate of change of ebola infections. However the data set was pretty bad, several data points didn't make sense. Having said that, I could find nothing that could enlighten our discussion at all. I will say that what I could glean from the data did not support an exponential, or even geometric progression (point to you). The first several weeks of July pointed to an infection rate that was fairly constant of about 12 cases/day (Sierra Leone data only). The last few data points (up to August 13, 2014) pointed to a rate of about 23.5 cases/day.
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
I can somewhat understand why some who are showing perhaps the early signs of Ebola are very reluctant to go to an Ebola quarantined hospital if they turn out not to be infected with Ebola but suffering from malaria for instance but end up contracting Ebola in the hospital because of very lax and poor infection control procedures.
Shows once again that sex with monkeys is a bad idea.
Africa was, is and always will be a cesspool.
Bring Out Your Dead
Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.
The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.
So far the false positive rate is 100%.
At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.
*sigh* Such is life, and death...
Well, then, you should stop doing that.
There are 20 designated Ebola quarentine centers in the U.S. If cases start appearing here, how many people would willingly allow themselves to be taken there if they developed any of the early symptoms, wondering if they just had a cold, but knowing they would be transported to a facility where the virus is killing people if they alerted authorities to their symptoms? How many neighbors, out of fear, would tell authorities someone is showing symptoms? Seems to me that people would want to avoid going to a quarentine center, well, like the plague.
I was referring to your mother.
“was fairly constant of about 12 cases/day (Sierra Leone data only). The last few data points (up to August 13, 2014) pointed to a rate of about 23.5 cases/day. “
Yeah.....That’s why it’s difficult to pull one data set and see a trend...you have to look at it in it’s entirety. But like I said, numbers give me a headache...lol
As to the situation there with the clinics, this is nothing new..The locals think the clinics and the doctors have brought the aids to them. They think people go to hospitals to die and if you get rid of the hospitals and doctors, the disease will go away and nobody will die.
This is why for some weeks now, voluteers have been deserting their posts, and without law enforcement the locals can’t wait to close these clinics down and take whatever is valuable, along with the Ebola infection.
Call it a Darwin award candidate....posthumously of course.
Back to the numbers.....
“was fairly constant of about 12 cases/day (Sierra Leone data only). The last few data points (up to August 13, 2014) pointed to a rate of about 23.5 cases/day. “
That alone should tell you something...The initial outbreak being 12 cases per day, has only doubled to 23.5 cases in what is now months...
If this disease was anywhere near as volatile as some people seem to think it is, What would you anticipate the per day new cases should look like?
No question, this is the worst Ebola outbreak in recorded history. But it’s not showing the ability to become a pandemic. It spreads in Africa for a number of social reasons, and those reasons do not even need to include population density. It’s all the other stuff, as we are discussing today with the clinics..Population density is really not contributing a lot to it..as you can ascertain as you read the anecdotal stories and just multiply it over 4 backward countries or regions X 500....,...
When I see it running like a forest fire into central and Eastern Africa, with very high initial infections rates (verified) and a mortality rate in the low 50s or even lower, I can assume it is uncontrolled and wild and may go farther.
But I’m just not seeing that..I’ve been looking for it, but it’s not there yet.
The sad thing is, that you have to put human blood on those chicken bones...
If this disease was anywhere near as volatile as some people seem to think it is, What would you anticipate the per day new cases should look like?
Actually, that jump from ~12/day to ~23.5/day was over a period of about 3 weeks (first 3 weeks of July/14 to August 13/14)
If the disease were as volatile as some news stories suggest, I would expect it turn into an exponential rate of growth. As of now I don't see it. But we may also be looking at the near 0 value of squiggly lines (that's a technical term, BTW) typical to a an exponential rate curve that hasn't really blossomed yet.
The thing that disturbs me most is that the data published by the CDC is so obviously not true. The cases in their raw form are cumulative rates of infection of a given area, and the date the data point was finalized (typically 3-4 days before the data point is published). But that reporting has data where the cumulative total at some later date is lower than that value reported at an earlier date. That simply cannot happen and gives rise to negative rates of growth..
BTW, the data suggests that median mean mortality rate per infection is hovering around 45%.
I have not paid too much attention to the CDC data....I have attempted on a couple of occasions to make sense of it, but like you, I found it confusing..
I think the WHO data is better as a analysis tool, largely because it's made of media consumption and not for statisticians.
IMO, they claim often that better medical care on site, increases the likelihood for a patient to survive, but I don't buy it in it's totality. I think it helps at the margins however, so Unchecked, the disease would probably kill in the 70+ percent range, but with medical intervention it should be between 55 and 65% with the average or mean, based on previous outbreaks at 60%.
The last data set I looked at was from last weekend, and the death rates seemed to be approaching that number. or at least the deviation was not as big as it was, so I made a assumption that the outbreak was at it's worst and was beginning to turn the corner. But it will take a full months worth of data, IMO, to show this, if it is. I would expect it to achieve a sort of equilibrium first.
Anyway, that is what I am expecting, but all that could obviously change, should we get a jump into another region.
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