re: #6 wrenchwench

Nobody cares about Malaria, though.

That’s because malaria is a more or less known quantity. And malaria patients aren’t directly infectious to the extent that Ebola victims are. Normally, it takes certain species of mosquitoes. Which may not be that common in the US.

Another reason there are so many fears about Ebola is that we don’t actually know how much risk there is of transmission. One would have thought that the Spanish nurse wouldn’t have got it, but she did. One would have thought that after the nurse took down the information that Duncan had been to Liberia, that information would both have reached the people making the decisions during his first visit to the hospital, and made an impression on them. But at least one of those things did not happen.

In other words, we don’t know how wide the divergence is between the capabilities and competencies we thought we have, and those we actually have. We only know that there is a divergence.

Let’s say that a more or less rational follower of the news estimates that it’s 99.9% that the new patient does not have Ebola. That leaves 1 chance in a thousand. But what are the implications of that 1 in a thousand? Pretty dire, actually. Because if he got it from such fleeting secondhand contact, then our prospects of containing the virus are not nearly as good as we thought. So he might be not that sanguine.

Maybe this hypothetical guy is a worry wart. Maybe he should place the odds much lower. But we have a bad track record with such odds making. People estimated, before the Challenger blew up, that it was one in a Big Number that it would blow up. But it happened, out of a NotBigNumber of launches, and so retrospectively, their confidence was wildly misplaced.

It is not entirely unhinged to think that the possible scope of the Ebola epidemic has a “fat tail” in the language of Nouriel Roubini.