re: #302 yoshicastmaster

Contradiction? No problem:

wheat-dogghazi-bola: “within the sample… 3% fell outside the 21-day period”

Did you see me say I didn’t trust that sample because of the conditions it was taken in?

Just let me know if that 3% in the sample for the scientific study was observed or not. (Not to mention that last 2%).

Not well-observed, no.

As far as the number of cases at day 42, who cares? Pretty sure the point is the number of cases between 21 and 42. Which is not insignificant. Let’s see, if 8,900 people in Africa contracted ebola since March, and 5% will show symptoms after 21 days, and a train leaves Monrovia headed west at 30 kph… where’s my calculator?!?

Why would you assume that?

But seriously, if the best math, science, whatever that we have predicts that 3-5% of ebola cases incubate longer than 21 days, then you tell me: is 21 days the maximum incubation period for ebola? I’m going with “no.”

That’s not true, though. The mathematical models are not the best science we have. Their usefulness is completely debatable; lots of biology stuff does not act statistically simple, because there’s shitloads of feedback loops.

So we don’t actually know what that percentage of people longer than 21 days are. We don’t know if they exist at all; if they do, they may exist as 2.9% at 22 days and .1% at 23 days and 0% at 24 days.

We have a lot of observation, unfortunately, of transmitted ebola, so that we have never seen a case incubate longer than 21 under good-record-keeping conditions is significant.

That WHO page is weirdly sloppy in a few ways, actually. It seems like it may have been written by someone for whom English isn’t their first language.