Chris, your whole website is based on ‘what’s more scary than exponential growth?’ And ebola is IN exponential growth, with only twenty doublings until worldwide infection totality.
But I tell you what’s more scary than exponential growth: when you look at a log-linear graph, and see the hockey stick. n=a^BT become n=a^(b^cT).
Now go over to the wikipedia article on the African ebola outbreak, and go down to the ‘time progression’ part of the article. Look at the graph of total ebola infections. you’ll see that each country has two curves: the second curve is the straight line on the log-linear graph. That’s scary. But the first curve is before the country mounts a serious response to the various transmission paths: that’s the j-hook on our log-linear graph.
That’s terrifying.
Now all the news is about our government downplaying the risk and SPREADING the disease.
if you start at our current 11-day doubling, then by 5 months we will have 131 000 cases. if you cut that to 5 3/4 days, then that 131000 US cases occurs by Christmas.
Nigeria’s non-response curve had 3-day doublings. Nominally, they’ve beaten the disease. If they’re not lying.
http://nypost.com/2014/10/16/alarm-after-vomiting-passenger-dies-on-flight-from-nigeria-to-jfk/
From the you have TF be kidding me files:
*OBAMA SAID TO APPOINT RON KLAIN AS EBOLA CZAR, CNN TWEETS +The Washington DC crowd is so infected with itself, that it sees everything thorough the political lens.Forget medical experience, what the USA needs to conbat the worst Ebola pandemic ever is "an American lawyer and political operative best known for serving as Chief of Staff to two Vice Presidents - Al Gore (1995–1999) and Joseph Biden (2009–2011)."
Ebola pandemic starting? Quick! Get our best political operative on the job! That should fix it!!
He should consult right away with the three well-connected DC lawyers currently serving on the Federal reserve FOMC panel, and then check in with the DC lawyers/operatives/resume padders to be found stuffed into various embassies all over the globe.
Then with the 128 lawyers in the House and the 45 in the Senate.
After that, I should think he will have a good handle on exactly what to do next…
Ebola problem being viewed by our political elites as a failure of spin… too many folks actually becoming fearful, which is bad for the economy (stupid). I am sure fear is readily apparent in real time international air bookings data. How about a cruise? You never know who you are being trapped in a floating bubble with;
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-17/ebola-handling-healthcare-worker-currently-caribbean-cruise-shipWhat do you think the real time cruise cancelation data looks like? I am sure the real time data is telling a chilling story of recession to come.
Another answer is just to up the volume on the positive spin megaphone;
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-17/umich-consumer-confidence-surges-7-year-high-thanks-ebola-scare-sliding-marketYeah, right.
Interesting choice for a title. Czar meaning a person of authority, autocrat, and tyrant. Suggests control rather than prevention and cure.
My father used to say, "yeah when pigs fly" well I am watching for them because it's a crazy world out there and some shannagan's are hard to believe.
AK GrannyWGrit
AK GrannyWGrit,
Regarding the Ebola Czar, I'm thrilled! We haven't had a new Czar in months, if not years. When Obama got elected, we had Czars everywhere, and now it takes a fake crisis to get a new one.
I feel safer already, knowing there's a legal authority overseeing the process of getting around the red tape… that the legal authorities that have destroyed hospital administration put into place to begin with. (Please read this as a heavy dose of sarcasm - which I generally don't like)
If lawyers were the damn problem, what're the odds that more lawyers are the solution?
This is a dizzyingly stupid response, using equally stupid language. I wish all of D.C. would just go get massages and sit this one out so the people who know what's going on could step up on their own. Natural leadership would go a lot farther in these instances than elected leadership.
Sigh…
Aaron
About ten years ago as I was becoming aware of the peak oil story I sent Jim Kunstler an e-mail asking his advice on how we could get our government to get off it's dead behind and get in front of the pending crisis. His response then was that to rely on the government was folly and that any real change and prudent preparation would have to come from individuals and communities of aware and educated members of our society. This is even more apparent now. The spin and total concentration on political effect versus what is accurate and effective is mind boggling. For Obama to appoint a political operative attorney starkly underscores that fact. Thank goodness for the work you and Adam have done here. As I continually strengthen my family's resilience and resourcefulness it is more than helpful to come here and find like minded folks. I agree with your assessment of the personal risk of this virus being very small. However if any institution can snafu a manageable situation into an outright crisis our government at the federal, state and local levels is eminently qualified to do so. I guess the bottom line for all of us "peons" is to control what you can in your daily life, build resilience on a daily basis, and try to build community with like minded people.
…at least they are getting us used to have a "Czar" running things. USSR redux? SMH.
weakened the steel framed structure and it caused a global pandemic via column 79. Said the well informed NIST spokesman. "We did not find any evidence of the use of explosives because we did not look."Now go away and leave us alone!
This signals that "we are under attack" (Scary music)
"a tipster with knowledge of the emergency response" is about as good as "a white house insider whose name cannot be released." Pictures of ambulances, hazmat suits. Planting images and ideas in the news and psyche.
This is the way the propaganda arm of TPTB work. We have a ring side seat.
Hey, you know me…I'm about as concerned by exponential behavior as the anybody, but not (yet) in the case of Ebola.
I'm pretty confident that this incident will burn out and blow over, just like those before, mainly because of the low rate of host-to-host transmission and the low rate of mutation.
Note that there have been zero cases reported among patient zero's friends and contacts. Nobody from the plane rides. Nobody else at all.
Note also that Nigeria seems to have beaten the disease, as you note.
But mainly I am confident that we cannot simply extrapolate this virus' rates of infection out through many more doublings because people will change their behavior, like they did in Nigeria, well before things got to "5 months, 131,000 cases" stage.
I certainly would.
I have travel on my schedule right now and I have almost no worries about going on those trips. I'll be a bit more vigilant watching for ill passengers, but I'm usually very careful in high density situations to contain my incidental face touching during flu season anyways so this will be a slight add to my existing awareness patterns.
But if suddenly Ebola was striking all over the place, I would not even travel.
And I would not be alone. People are people, and they usually don't want to die.
Remember SARS?
Here's how people are in the face of a deadly contagious illness:
Mall nearly empty after false SARS rumor spreads Apr 24, 2003 KENT -- No one at the Great Wall Shopping Mall has died from the illness known as SARS. No one at the Asian-themed shopping mall, located where Kent and Renton meet, is suffering from SARS. There isn't a single "probable" case of SARS in King County, according to the Public Health -- Seattle King County. Now have some dim sum, please, because business at this indoor mall has dropped as much as 50 percent, business owners estimate, since rumors began circulating that the place has been infested with the severe respiratory illness that's infected more than 4,400 people worldwide, about half in China. According to one rumor, an employee at the mall died from the disease. According to another, two employees at the Ranch 99 grocery store have been diagnosed with it. And, rumor has it, Christine Lee -- who along with husband, Omar Lee, owns the shopping mall and part of the Imperial Gardens Seafood restaurant there -- was in the hospital for a week with SARS. She was vacationing in Florida with her children. "This is totally ridiculous," said Henry Ku, who owns two restaurants -- Taiwan Restaurant and Shanghai Restaurant -- at opposite ends of the mall. He waved his arm at the 20-or-so tables at Taiwan, checking his watch. It read 12:11 p.m. "Usually it's a full house at lunch. Today, only one table."
[quote=mikkel]I apologize if this is addressed in the subscription only part, but the most likely effect from ebola will be further rejection of the system.
[/quote]
The level of fear generated by the media here in the US regarding Ebola is just silly.
Again, at Emory they did actual tests on surfaces in the highly infectious patient's room. No surfaces in the room tested positive for Ebola RNA. That means, airplane seat cushions, lav doorknobs, toilet seats, they are all very low probability transmission mechanisms.
Unless you are actively cleaning up the fluids from an infected patient, odds would seem to indicate you won't get Ebola. That's what the numbers say. We can imagine all sorts of Government Plots to cover up information - but why go out of our way to buy into the fear thing? It really resonated with me when I read Chris's comments about some people seeming to want to believe everything was going to collapse and are disappointed when it doesn't - or when Chris isn't peddling fear to the extent people seem to want him to. I see that exact same thing all the time in people's responses to my posts.
We have enough stuff going on that is bad, we don't need to invent more of it.
Somehow we get trapped in one of two states - "all is well" hopium, or "the world will collapse into a Mad Max situation, you just watch."
At the same time, I don't think Ebola will burn itself out. Once infections get into the hundreds of thousands in West Africa - and unless we can manage to stop the doubling rate, that's what will happen in a few months from now - people in the area will start fleeing, and the refugees will overload the neighboring country medical systems, starting off the exponential growth in those new areas.
If we imagine people will just sit around in country, wait to get infected, then die just so the outbreak will conveniently burn itself out - does this sound likely? People move in anticipation of events. If you know you are going to be punched, will you just stand there and take it, or will you try to move out of the way first - anticipating the blow?
My concern is that with a large enough infected population in West Africa, enough "embers" of Ebola will be blown around the world via refugees - in areas with decent healthcare systems and enthusiastic governments, it will be handled and contained, while in areas with poor healthcare systems, weak governments, and relatively ignorant populations it will take root, grow exponentially, and decimate the society.
In the past, Ebola outbreaks "burned out" only because a) they happened in remote areas, and b) because MSF would parachute in and engage in quarantine plus contact tracing. Once Ebola is spread to cities around the world, the number of instances would be too large to contain through that technique - not enough MSF, too many hot spots, as well as sovereign governments that might actively want to hide Ebola infections to avoid international isolation. And so even if people's behavior changed, they still need to eat, grow food, interact, etc to survive, especially in poorer areas. And in countries with poor healthcare systems, the only healthcare available is home healthcare - which will invariably transmit the disease to the caregivers.
So after watching the pattern of infections here in the US, I am relatively sanguine about Ebola in America. Although it all looks like a pathetic Keystone Cops response right now, in our usual way we'll eventually sort it out (perhaps - learn from MSF and see how they do things? Genius.) and we will do the right thing once we move the bureaucrats aside and focus on the practical issues. It took Pearl Harbor to get the USN to stop thinking about Battleships and start focusing on Aircraft Carriers. Same thing here with Ebola.
At the end of the day, it is not the US that makes me nervous. Its the rest of the world…once we have 100k-500k possible refugee/carriers in West Africa, I worry especially about the poor countries around the world with airports, weak governments, and bad healthcare systems…
Hmmm. Did somebody purposely get infected with Ebola in Liberia and then equally purposely try to get close to the Pentagon to infect key military personnel? Maybe not, but it would be an excellent asymmetrical warfare strike, especially if it successfully got an exponentially rising basket of cases started at the Pentagon. Boko Haram? ISIS? CIA (false flag)? Or did someone at the CDC tell the patient it would be ok to go on a bus tour of the Pentagon after coming here from Liberia with a fever and vomiting?
"Welcome to the Hunger Games. And may the odds be ever in your favor."
Interesting development, IMHO. MSM media outlets, after worshiping Obama since '04 and protecting him from all criticism, are now starting to let a few harsh criticisms leak out. It seems even they are pretty sure Obama's going to receive a harsh rebuke on election day Nov 4th, though no one's expecting an actual "solution" since it will only be Republicans getting elected.
Here's Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/articles/who-do-they-think-we-are-1413502475
Here's one from CNBC: http://www.cnbc.com/id/102097506
If they're discarding Obama, they could save us a lot of time and money and just tell us now who's going to be President in 2016. (At one time I actually feared he would find an excuse to cancel the '16 election by executive order, and no one would complain). I don't really want to know, mind you, but I ask only in the interest of efficiency.
