Posted on 10/17/2014 3:57:05 PM PDT by blam
Shane Ferro
October 17, 2014
Multiplication — that's what people don't understand about Ebola, according to Nassim Taleb, the author of "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan."
More specifically, Taleb explained to Business Insider that many people talking about the disease don't "have a grasp of the severity of the multiplicative process."
The argument that the US should be more worried about a disease like cancer — which has more stable rates of infection than Ebola does currently — is a logic that Taleb calls "the empiricism of the idiots."
The basic idea: The growth rate of Ebola infection is nonlinear, so the number of people catching it doubles every 20 days. Because of this, you have to act quickly at the source of infections, he says. "The closer you are to the source, the more effective you are at slowing it down ... it is much more rational to prevent it now than later."
The problem Taleb sees is that if there is not more urgent action in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea — to the point of restricting travel and other measures that may now seem like an overreaction — then there will be consequences here.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Remember the SARS outbreak? Oh, that’s right there wasn’t one.
And
11.1.05
St. Paul, Minn. — (AP) - President Bush outlined a $7.1 billion strategy Tuesday to prepare for the danger of a pandemic influenza outbreak, saying he wanted to stockpile enough vaccine to protect 20 million Americans against the current strain of bird flu as a first wave of protection.
So never prepare for any kind of disease outbreak? That’s what you’re peddling?
Yeah... I was wondering the same
Since health officials are seemingly unsure themselves how ebola is spread, is it any wonder that people are believing what they’re hearing from the rumor mill?
You are right about that. We know he is not about to restrict travel but why continue to issue visas to anyone wanting to come to the U.S.? And having the new czar report to Susan Rice? She’s been responsibility for the death of way too many people already.
Yes...what YOU said!!! People don’t trust government.
Part of the problem is exponential growth. The other part is that even if the medical clowns did their job correctly, the response to an Ebola infection is not scalable. A response that might work for 1 or 2 cases becomes difficult if there are 10-20 cases, and impossible if there are 100-200.
For the US, "the source" is its international ports of entry and its open, intentionally unguarded borders.
Any politician or bureaucrat who refuses to acknowledge that either has a hidden anti-America agenda, or is too dumb to solve the elementary school level puzzle about getting all the pebbles back in the jar.
IMO, these guys are not dumb.
Several cancers have a viral component in creating the conditions for cancer to occur, so it could be said that it's a result of infection. HPV is going to be a biggie in a decade or so when the wave of the most licentious people hit late middle age. Cervical cancer, penile cancer, head neck and throat cancer from oral sex all will begin to spike, due to the spread of HPV which seemed rather minor to the sex-obsessed of the time. This is the reason for the strange, almost panicky insistence upon HPV vaccine for essentially children despite reported severe side effects and even death being associated with it.
I agree, neither of them mince words. It won’t surprise me if Sowell writes a piece on Ebola and specifically about 0bama and the CDC not limiting travel.
Given the above, then use the chart of actual Ebola case transmission rates which starts at about 100 cases in March, but with 20 cases this month (Oct), I would figure about 100 cases in Nov/Dec gives us...
1600 cases early next year, maybe March?
No, previous outbreaks were addressed quickly by international organizations.
There was NOT the confusion and misinformation as todays fiasco.
Start with this month Oct. at 20 cases. Then go out from there.
That’s a better way to put it.
FIGURE 1. Estimated number of Ebola cases, with and without correction for underreporting,* through September 30 — EbolaResponse modeling tool, Liberia and Sierra Leone combined, 2014
Oh yea, at the link above you can get your own ebola tool.
“CDC has created a spreadsheet-based modeling tool called EbolaResponse that allows users to estimate the number of Ebola cases in a community (available at http://dx.doi.org/10.15620/cdc.24900 )
The model tracks patients through the following states: susceptible, infected, incubating, infectious, and recovered (an SIIR model). EbolaResponse is, in effect, a Markov chain model and is similar to an Ebola model built in 2004 (1).”
Looks like thesewould be straight lines on a semi-log chart. Or maybe the spread is a Fibonacci series like his rabbits reproducing problem.
Ebola deaths in West Africa (Data: WHO / Chart CC BY 4.0: JV Chamary / Source: http://onforb.es/1sCVxE1)
Worldwide cases..
I hope the charts above helps those grasp the severity of this.
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