“How many deaths does the U.S. experience every year just from influenza? I don’t know, but it is a lot more that 333!”
With influenza the deaths are primarily the elderly. It rarely kills those who are infected. The population, 330 million or so, hardly notices. But Ebola kills 99% of those infected regardless of age. The potential infection areas in Africa are relatively unpopulated populated. But when it gets to a village it has been known to kill everybody.
If Ebola got to, say, New York, we could be looking at 20,000 deaths per day. People would flee New York and it would go with them and rapidly cover the country. In the 1918 flue epidemic my grandfather went with the sheriff to put a sign on the main road that influenza had reached the town. They were lying in the hopes of keeping people fleeing large cities away. But it was too late. The flu hit their tiny town and killed a hefty percentage. Ebola would likely have killed them all.
That’s the difference. BTW, at the last large outbreak Iran sent “doctors” to collect samples. Imagine weaponized Ebola in the hands of people who think dying for Allah is the best thing they can do.
Going to go look it up, but I am pretty sure ebola doesn’t have an airborne human to human vector.
ebola is a contact/ bodily fluids/ contaminated environment AFAIK.
Google and CDC are my friends. BRB.
Point is, not sure it would spread like a Hanta or novel H1N1 would.
just back from the CDC site. Ebola’s natural reservoir is believed to be bats, with African fruit bats the likely culprit. They are the carriers. contact with the bats and/or their feces/bites is the presumed vector to a human ‘index’.
No identified vector beyond contact and contamination.
SO ... not a typical ‘outbreak’ sort of virus.
Wow!