A Frightening Curve: How Fast Is the Ebola Outbreak Growing?
So every day or week that goes by, the epidemic gets harder and harder to control. The number of cases rises. The number of beds, doctors and nurses needed to stop it just keeps going up. Quicker and quicker.
The actual number of cases is likely higher than what’s been reported, the World Health Organization says, so the models are underestimating the situation.
“The window of opportunity is closing in a sense,” Vespignani says. “And that’s why it’s very important to understand that this is the moment to act.”
When we first heard about these numbers, they sounded a bit alarmist. But then a few other modelers published their own models. The forecast is consistent: There’s exponential growth with somewhere around 15,000 cases by mid-October.
One set of projections comes from Jeffrey Shaman, an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He’s making models of the Ebola epidemic for the U.S. government. When he first saw the results of his models, the numbers were so high that he was afraid to make them public.
“I didn’t want to scare people,” Shaman says. “But we’re really in uncharted territory here. We’ve never had a sustained outbreak of Ebola like this, certainly nothing of this magnitude.”
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