(4) Let’s put aside the Ebola-as-weapon scenario—some
things are too depressing to contemplate at length—and look at the range
of scenarios for what we have in front of us, from best-case to
worst-case. The epidemiological protocols for containing Ebola rest on
four pillars: contact tracing, case isolation, safe burial, and
effective public information. On October 14, the New York Times
reported that in Liberia, with “only” 4,000 cases, “Schools have shut
down, elections have been postponed, mining and logging companies have
withdrawn, farmers have abandoned their fields.” Which means that the
baseline for “best-case” is already awful.
In September, the CDC ran a series of models on the spread
of the virus and came up with a best-case scenario in which, by January
2015, Liberia alone would have a cumulative 11,000 to 27,000 cases.
That’s in a world where all of the aid and personnel gets where it needs
to be, the resident population behaves rationally, and everything
breaks their way. The worst-case scenario envisioned by the model is
anywhere from 537,000 to 1,367,000 cases by January. Just in Liberia.
With the fever still raging out of control.
By which point, all might well be lost. Anthony Banbury is
coordinating the response from the United Nations, which, whatever its
many shortcomings, is probably the ideal organization to take the lead
on Ebola. Banbury’s view is chilling: “The WHO advises within 60 days we
must ensure 70 percent of infected people are in a care facility and 70
percent of burials are done without causing further infection. . . .
We either stop Ebola now or we face an entirely unprecedented situation for which we do not have a plan [emphasis added]”.
What’s terrifying about the worst-case scenario isn’t just
the scale of human devastation and misery. It’s that the various state
actors and the official health establishment have already been
overwhelmed with infections in only the four-digit range. And if the
four pillars—contact tracing, case isolation, safe burial, and effective
public information—fail, no one seems to have even a theoretical plan
for what to do.
(5) And by the way, things could get worse. All of those
worst-case projections assume that the virus stays contained in a
relatively small area of West Africa, which, with a million people
infected, would be highly unlikely. What happens if and when the virus
starts leaking out to other parts of the world?
I think the President's plan to try to contain it in Africa is laudable, even though we have to acknowledge that some of the thousands we are sending are going to die.
However, the way the government has addressed the virus since it arrived on our shores is beyond incompetent.
Could make the legendary Black Plague look like practice?
ReplyDeleteKarl
Karl,
ReplyDeleteExcept that the Black Death was not a legend, but a genuinely historical and real CATASTROPHE. The loss of life in Europe alone between 1346 to 1350 goes from a minimum of one third to TWO THIRDS. Meaning it's possible 67 percent of the entire population of Europe died of the Plague during those terrible years.
Moreover, the huge advances we have made in medical knowledge and techology since the 1340s means we have FAR LESS of an excuse for not taking certain elementary, obvious precautions than our forebears did. I mean immediate travel bans to or from the worse affected Ebola countries and quarantines of all travelers from that unlucky part of the world. The longer our bungling president and government dithers about doing that, the worse it will be for us.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks